A view from Malawi
This article appeared in the Malawian newspaper The Nation on 25 October 2005:
---
NATION MALAWI
Tuesday, 25 October 2005
Features
Malawi’s food crisis worsens
by George Ntonya, 25 October 2005 - 08:33:50
A village woman and her three year-old daughter sit at the entrance into Lilongwe Hotel premises looking frail and grubby.
She stretches her arm each time a person, particularly the one she thinks has spare money, passes by.
“Njala bwana (I am hungry, Sir),” she says lazily while stretching her arm, hoping the passer-by would drop a Kwacha or two for her to buy some food.
A few metres down the road, from SS Rent-A-Car offices to National Bank, there are also some women strategically positioned, waiting for good Samaritans to drop any kind of assistance they can afford.
The situation worsens on Friday when troops of such women from villages and squatters around the capital city flock into the city to ask for alms, targeting Malawians of Asian origin, who they believe to be in a mood for donations on Friday — their holy day.
A majority of Malawian smallholder farmers harvested barely enough to take them to the next harvest because of a dry spell that occurred at the end of the rainy season and the scarcity of fertilizer at the beginning of the season, two factors that contributed significantly to poor national harvest.
Currently, nearly 4.5 million Malawians are believed to be in need of food aid. Some may die of hunger-related illnesses if government and donor agencies do not engage top gear to scale up efforts to make food available in all the areas of the country.
At the moment most Admarc depots do not have maize, the country’s staple food.
During the 2001/2002 food crisis tens of Malawians, most of them children and women, died of hunger-related illnesses. Cases of malnutrition were commonplace.
World Food Programme (WFP) deputy executive director Sheila Sisulu who was in the country a few days ago to assess the food situation, said in an interview Malawi risks sliding into a food crisis similar to the one that occurred in 2001/2002 if the government and the donor community do not scale up efforts to make food available to the hungry households.
“We need to get the food to places where it is needed almost immediately,” said Sisulu who held discussions with President Bingu wa Mutharika, government officials and representatives of the donor community and NGOs on the current food situation.
“There are several pressures on the short window we have to avert the crisis. That window is between now and the end of December,” she added.
Malawi and Zimbabwe are the worst hit by the food shortage in the southern African region.
President Bingu wa Mutharika declared a state of national disaster last Friday and appealed to the international community for support.
A statement released by WFP on October 16, World Food Programme, quotes the organisation’s Executive Director James Morris as saying that at a time when the world has been shocked by the horrific images of the earthquake in Pakistan, where some 20,000 lives were wiped out in a matter of a few seconds, there is also the biggest killer — hunger — that is away from cameras.
“Few people realise that hunger and related diseases still claim more lives than Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. What is worse, the number of chronically hungry is on the rise again, after decades of progress. We’re losing ground,” Morris is quoted as saying.
Morris contrasted the situation in developed countries, where the most vulnerable are protected by special provisions, such as social services, unemployment benefit, child allowances and income support, to that in the developing world such as Malawi, where there are very few of these safety nets.
“Go across sub-Saharan Africa and add conflict and HIV and Aids to the equation, and the situation gets even worse. The spotlight is now on Malawi, where millions of people are facing a food crisis, caused by the failure of seasonal rains and the collapse of food production as a direct result of HIV and Aids,” he said.
But there are indications that the food shortage will recur next year and years thereafter, unless mechanisms are put in place to ensure better yield. There is need for the government to change some of its policies and increase budget allocation and other resources to agriculture. It has also to make farm inputs affordable to the smallholder farmers and help them market their produce at good prices.
People’s Progressive Movement (PPM) president Aleke Banda said unless Malawians change their attitude to work harder in their gardens and government makes farm inputs affordable Malawi will not be able to address the problem of food insecurity.
According to him, laziness is one of the contributing factors to the country’s perpetual problem of food insecurity. At some point, he said, Malawians were known for hard work, but that hard working spirit is absent.
“People have to change their attitude. They have to work hard,” he said.
For two consecutive years Malawi, like South Africa, had substantial maize surplus and commentators believe that the country has the potential to feed itself and say bye to food aid from the donor community.
“Malawi has a lot of water. It does not have to depend on rain-fed agriculture only. Small irrigation scheme can make a difference,” said Sisulu.
Former WFP country director Gerard van Dijk made similar remarks, saying it was sad that Malawi had to look for international support for food when it could produce its own food.
“It’s always difficult to explain [the food insecurity] to outsiders seeing such a green country,” he said adding that despite the support the country has been receiving from the international community Malawi continues to be among the poorest countries, where many people have no food most of the time.
---
NATION MALAWI
Tuesday, 25 October 2005
Features
Malawi’s food crisis worsens
by George Ntonya, 25 October 2005 - 08:33:50
A village woman and her three year-old daughter sit at the entrance into Lilongwe Hotel premises looking frail and grubby.
She stretches her arm each time a person, particularly the one she thinks has spare money, passes by.
“Njala bwana (I am hungry, Sir),” she says lazily while stretching her arm, hoping the passer-by would drop a Kwacha or two for her to buy some food.
A few metres down the road, from SS Rent-A-Car offices to National Bank, there are also some women strategically positioned, waiting for good Samaritans to drop any kind of assistance they can afford.
The situation worsens on Friday when troops of such women from villages and squatters around the capital city flock into the city to ask for alms, targeting Malawians of Asian origin, who they believe to be in a mood for donations on Friday — their holy day.
A majority of Malawian smallholder farmers harvested barely enough to take them to the next harvest because of a dry spell that occurred at the end of the rainy season and the scarcity of fertilizer at the beginning of the season, two factors that contributed significantly to poor national harvest.
Currently, nearly 4.5 million Malawians are believed to be in need of food aid. Some may die of hunger-related illnesses if government and donor agencies do not engage top gear to scale up efforts to make food available in all the areas of the country.
At the moment most Admarc depots do not have maize, the country’s staple food.
During the 2001/2002 food crisis tens of Malawians, most of them children and women, died of hunger-related illnesses. Cases of malnutrition were commonplace.
World Food Programme (WFP) deputy executive director Sheila Sisulu who was in the country a few days ago to assess the food situation, said in an interview Malawi risks sliding into a food crisis similar to the one that occurred in 2001/2002 if the government and the donor community do not scale up efforts to make food available to the hungry households.
“We need to get the food to places where it is needed almost immediately,” said Sisulu who held discussions with President Bingu wa Mutharika, government officials and representatives of the donor community and NGOs on the current food situation.
“There are several pressures on the short window we have to avert the crisis. That window is between now and the end of December,” she added.
Malawi and Zimbabwe are the worst hit by the food shortage in the southern African region.
President Bingu wa Mutharika declared a state of national disaster last Friday and appealed to the international community for support.
A statement released by WFP on October 16, World Food Programme, quotes the organisation’s Executive Director James Morris as saying that at a time when the world has been shocked by the horrific images of the earthquake in Pakistan, where some 20,000 lives were wiped out in a matter of a few seconds, there is also the biggest killer — hunger — that is away from cameras.
“Few people realise that hunger and related diseases still claim more lives than Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined. What is worse, the number of chronically hungry is on the rise again, after decades of progress. We’re losing ground,” Morris is quoted as saying.
Morris contrasted the situation in developed countries, where the most vulnerable are protected by special provisions, such as social services, unemployment benefit, child allowances and income support, to that in the developing world such as Malawi, where there are very few of these safety nets.
“Go across sub-Saharan Africa and add conflict and HIV and Aids to the equation, and the situation gets even worse. The spotlight is now on Malawi, where millions of people are facing a food crisis, caused by the failure of seasonal rains and the collapse of food production as a direct result of HIV and Aids,” he said.
But there are indications that the food shortage will recur next year and years thereafter, unless mechanisms are put in place to ensure better yield. There is need for the government to change some of its policies and increase budget allocation and other resources to agriculture. It has also to make farm inputs affordable to the smallholder farmers and help them market their produce at good prices.
People’s Progressive Movement (PPM) president Aleke Banda said unless Malawians change their attitude to work harder in their gardens and government makes farm inputs affordable Malawi will not be able to address the problem of food insecurity.
According to him, laziness is one of the contributing factors to the country’s perpetual problem of food insecurity. At some point, he said, Malawians were known for hard work, but that hard working spirit is absent.
“People have to change their attitude. They have to work hard,” he said.
For two consecutive years Malawi, like South Africa, had substantial maize surplus and commentators believe that the country has the potential to feed itself and say bye to food aid from the donor community.
“Malawi has a lot of water. It does not have to depend on rain-fed agriculture only. Small irrigation scheme can make a difference,” said Sisulu.
Former WFP country director Gerard van Dijk made similar remarks, saying it was sad that Malawi had to look for international support for food when it could produce its own food.
“It’s always difficult to explain [the food insecurity] to outsiders seeing such a green country,” he said adding that despite the support the country has been receiving from the international community Malawi continues to be among the poorest countries, where many people have no food most of the time.
posted by Mike Brady at 10:12 PM
1 Comments:
A thought on 'laziness' prompted by this study published in January 2002 looking at the impact of HIV/AIDS on agricultural productivity:
"Chronic sicknesses tend to trigger a sequence of impacts on the rural household economy. The most immediate impact is loss of labour. Over 70% of the households affected by chronic sicknesses experienced loss of labour. This loss leads to other problems, like delayed agricultural operations (45% of the affected households), leaving land fallow (23%), change in crop mix (26%), and a change in sources of livelihood (36%). All these factors lead to decreased agricultural productivity, as experienced by 72% of the households affected by chronic sicknesses. However, decrease in agricultural productivity is not caused by chronic sicknesses alone. Other factors like lack of farm inputs and/or the inability to purchase them, and the unfavourable rains of the past year impacted a majority of the farmers. However, we note that the proportion of households that experienced a decrease in agricultural productivity was highest among those affected by chronic sickness, i.e. 72%, as compared to 56% among households affected by other sicknesses and 59% of those not affected by any major sickness. 93% of the very poor category households that were affected by chronic sickness experienced a decrease in crop yields."
Click here for the full study.
Post a Comment
<< Home