allAfrica.com: Africa: Food And Sustainable Development - A Roundtable (Part 1) (Page 1 of 3)

Approximately 80 percent of Africa's population is engaged in some form of agriculture - mostly subsistence. But despite this great presence on the land, food security has remained elusive. On August 26 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a report saying that 21 African countries face "food emergencies" and millions of people are on the brink of starvation.

In Southern Africa alone, 13 million people need food aid. In Malawi, three quarters of the population is now dependent on food aid, in a country that produced such a bumber crop of maize in 1999 that free seed and agricultural goods were given to three million farmers. That crisis brought allAfrica's Charles Cobb Jr. to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC, where he sat down with the group's Director-General, Per Pinstrup-Anderson, and three research fellows - Eleni Gabre-Madhin, Kenneth Simler and Todd Benson, to ask if any solution was in sight. Excerpts from that conversation:

Todd Benson: Malawi, perhaps in contrast to some of the other countries in the region experiencing food security problems, is quite well endowed for high agricultural productivity. It gets relatively reliable rains. It has good soils. But as a result of the good conditions it has a high population, so what we have seen over the generations is degradation, particularity in soil fertility so that most farmers are now harvesting, say, one ton of corn per hectare when they really could be harvesting six tons of corn from their fields.

One of the major problems is that although it is well-endowed from a subsistence standpoint, it is not very well endowed from a marketing standpoint. Malawi is landlocked. Transport of imports, transport of exports is very expensive.

Malawi has also been experiencing considerable macro-economic instability since the late 1980s and early 90s with it really tightening up in the late 1990s. They have been having regular currency devaluations on the order of 50 to 100 percent every twelve to eighteen months since 1994. One of the outcomes of this is very high interest rates, so farmers, if they want to get credit to use commercial agricultural technologies, even simple ones such as fertilizer or improved seeds, are facing credit charges of 40 to 60 percent a year. And given that the markets are very weak, it is very difficult to profitably employ these high productivity technologies when you're facing those sort of credit charges.

So, what you're left with is farmers working with what is primarily a subsistence orientation in their cropping. They want to make sure that they grow enough for their families and if they have a surplus for the market, fine, but the market has proven to be something of a difficult partner in advancing their livelihoods.

And there is chronic poverty; a chicken and egg thing. The rural Malawians are so poor that the markets don't develop very well. The markets are so ineffectual that the farmers can't really get ahead. I was involved with poverty analysis in Malawi and our results, which are very similar to what's found in surrounding countries, show that well over 65 percent of all Malawian houses aren't meeting their basic needs year in and year out. And this is just a very simple basic poverty line - even lower than the one dollar a day line that you often hear about.

So what do they do when faced with a food crisis such as we are seeing this year? They actually have very very few options, since they are already living very close to the edge. A typical way Malawian farmers would get by in bad years would be to go work on neighboring farms, just doing daily piece work - ganyu labor" they call it. But if your neighbor is doing bad, he's not going to be employing anybody, or she might not be employing anybody. The typical way that they might be paid is in food, but if you don't have any food in your granary, how do you pay for the labor? You get by with the labor that you have in your house.

The other idea would be to use rural non-farm income sources, but when the population surrounding you is very poor there is very little demand. There might be demand for non-farm products but if there is no case to back up that demand the source is ineffectual. Remittances - there's a history of wage-labor migration down to South Africa, down to Zimbabwe and also to the urban centers of Malawi but there is unemployment in all of those areas. Malawians are not necessarily welcome in South Africa anymore because South Africa has got their own unemployment. So that, again, as a livelihood strategy, is not as effective as it once might have been.

And then livestock and asset sales would be another way for them to get by. But because of the high population density livestock is not very common in Malawi; grazing is very difficult to find. And then asset ownership is very, very low. You don't have people with large savings accounts or any savings; it's rare to find savings. Ownership of bicycles is quite low; radio ownership is quite low; talking about furniture or improved housing, it's just not seen in the rural areas.

But underlying all of this is this very poor market system that the Malawian food producers are a part of. Communications and transport linkages are very difficult. Credit capitalization for improved production in agriculture is very difficult to find.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin: The current crisis is about the inability to get food to people who need it in a timely manner. The real question that we want to think about as we look at the situation and its underlying causes and possible solutions, is why wasn't Malawi able to effectively import food when it needed it?

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