Francis has sent news of the chicken project and this picture.

I would like to tell you that we had a meeting on Saturday with people who have benefited from the chicken project. In our survey we have found that this has benefited fifteen families who have managed to buy clothes for their families and they have also managed to pay school fees for their children. When I say these children I mean the ones whom in the past their parents were failing to pay their school fees because of poverty before the chicken project started. This shows that the project is growing up.

The money used for fees and the clothes were coming from the sale of eggs and some chickens. People are now planning to plant vegetables because they have now harvested maize in their gardens. The chicken droppings will help them because they are good manure to vegetables.

Attached are the pictures of some of the chickens which are ready for sale.

Chickens up and running

Here is an update from Francis:

----
We have managed to buy three lots of chickens and the grown ones we have been selling them to shops around Mulanje. Some of the money we have been using to buy food and clothes for the orphans. The problem we faced here is that sometimes the chickens die but as of now the problem has lessened. The sad story is that the Agricultural Advisor who was helping us stopped to work with us because he was demand K2000 allowance every month which we failed.

As of now we are planning to plant maize because the weather is showing that any day we are going to receive the rains. This year we will only buy a little fertilizer because we will be using chickens droppings because they are good manure.

Are you having any plans this year of helping people with seeds as you did last year?
----

Regarding seeds, I am investigating micro-credit systems to see if there is a way that the small amount of money we are able to send can be used to get something sustainable off the ground.

Raising chickens

Francis sends the following message regarding the use of £50 sent to him just before Christmas:

---
After discussing with the committee we agreed that we should buy chickens therefore we bought 123 chicks which amounted to MK7380, and we bought feeds which cost us MK1550, we also vaccinated the chicks at MK500 and we paid the tranporter MK1070 which means we still owe the transporter Mk430. If you can calculate you can see that the money is adding up to MK10500 because this is what I received at the bank.
---

These chicks will mature to eat or sell in 6 weeks. The buiness plan developed by the village committee and agricultural advisor was to build up to have 250 chickens maturing every 3 weeks. The aim is for this to become a self-sustaining business, providing fresh chickens to surrounding communities and for villagers themselves.

A couple of weeks before this I was able to send £100 thanks to a friend. This money was used for food to meet immediate needs. But the price of maize is rising. Francis wrote on 9 December:

---
As I am writing this email the bag of maize is now K2200 and when we include transport it is becoming up to K2350/bag. From the money which you send it was K20,100 and bought 7 bags of maize K16,450.00. The money which was left I used to buy groundnuts seeds which I gave to 50 families.
---

Maize is going as a priority to orphans and their carers, generally grandparents.

The rain begins...

Francis writes after I sent £150 last week:

"With the money which you sent I bought 21 bags of fertiliser, 2 x 50kgs of maize seed and the remaining money I used to buy Chitenjes."

He tells me the seed is enough for 50 families. The rains have started. I spoke to him this morning and he said it is raining well.

The village committee prioritised buying seed and fertilizer and has developed a project with the help of an agricultural advisor to build a demonstration poultry house or "Khola" in Chichewa. To stock this with 250 broiler chickens will cost about 100 pounds, which they can start to eat or sell after 6 weeks. Their plan is to re-stock this every 3 weeks. So after the first couple of cycles it becomes self sustaining.

He is sending me a few chitenjes - the traditional cotton wrap skirts - which I will put up for sale to raise money for the village.

At the same time, even though the rains have started, there is little food. So with the 100 pounds I can send today, this will be split between buying maize, targetting the orphans living with elderly relatives, and the chicken project.

To help contribute, please see my eBay sale or email me to make another arrangement.

Francis writes...

I used the money to buy six bags of maize. I thought it is best at this time for the people. The villagers are happy to receive the help.

The Government has subsidised the fertiliser prices to MK950 to those who cannot afford to buy fertiliser at recommended price of MK2700. The poorest received coupons to buy fertiliser. This fertiliser will help them to prepare for a good harvest next year so that the people should be free from hunger.

A family needs 2 bags of "1 NPK" fertiliser for first application while the maize is very small. Another bag is for maturity (cob making).

We had a nice meeting including the village headman and over 200 people in attendance. We discussed issues concerning hunger and poverty. We concluded that if we can apply fertilizer this year we will get more harvest next year and if we can be keeping chickens and goats we will have manure next year and poverty will be deminished. But we need an agriculture advisor to assist us in looking after the poultry and goats farming as well as advising us on our fields.

For your information all the expenditure is on receipts and as well as my note book.

The money which is needed now is for fertiliser as the rains are promising, so that we can apply for first fertilizer in good time.

Lastly I am looking forward to hear from you. God be with you all and to those who assist you with the money.

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.

Natural disasters and international action

There has been a spate of natural disasters in recent months which have caused massive loss of life, including:

* The Asian Tsunami
* Floods in China
* Hurricanes Katrina and Stan
* Earthquake in Pakistan
* Drought in Malawi

The effectiveness of the UN and 'international community' in responding to these has been variable. Perhaps there is scope to address this through the Simultaneous Policy - SP (http://www.simpol.org.uk/).

Disasters on such a scale need a global response. It has been said that the number of winter tents needed for people made homeless by the Pakistan earthquake is greater than the number known to exist in the world.

While the 'international community' is sometimes quick to respond, as in the case of the Asian Tsunami when aid agencies said they had received sufficient donations and didn't want any more, in others the response is woeful.

The case of Malawi is particularly troubling to me as I lived and worked there for four years in the 1990s and still have friends in the country (see article below). One of my friends lives in a small village where there is literally no food and people are starving to death. His best friend died last week. While there are UN systems to deal with such situations they are inadequate. An appeal has been made for donations to provide food to the 5 million people at risk of malnutrition in Malawi and very little has been provided by governments or the public.

An emergency fund which could be called upon for such situations could be the solution. There have been suggestions of creating funds for development from a tax on currency transactions - the Tobin Tax. There could be other solutions. The member states of the UN have committed to provide 0.7% of GDP towards development, but virtually none have reached this target. The US uses its contributions to UN bodies as a political weapon, holding back funds when it objects to policy lines developed through the pseudo-democratic decision making bodies of organisations such as the World Health Organisation. If it has been agreed, should there be some way of ensuring it is gathered? Within the European Union, for example, Value Added Tax is used as the principle way that governments make their contributions to the EU budget.

A few years ago the World Development Movement highlighted how privatization policies forced on the country by the IMF had reduced food security and exacerbated the hunger problem (there is more on this in the article below).

When thinking of lasting solutions to poverty, aid is usually seen as a sticking plaster and we should really devote our energies to sustainable development. Yet if even the US has to call on international help to cope with a natural disaster, perhaps we have to re-think how we deal with aid and include some form of safety net within the SP policy package to ensure that help is not dependent on the whim of politicians, the media and the public, but a right of all.

I plan to keep this Malawi blog going for a while and have asked friends in Malawi to also contribute information about their experiences. Though their immediate priority is staying alive and helping their neighbours stay alive, this may also help to bring them into the SP campaign and we certainly need greater involvement from people in southern countries.

Your comments are also welcome.

If you are interested in attending a public meeting to discuss these issues further - while helping to raise some money for disaster relief in Malawi - please see http://www.pledgebank.com/dealwithdisaster/ to indicate your interest and to receive an invitation when the event is organised.