Thundu Village, Malawi — The sudden appearance of lush bright green spots surrounding the small mountain village of Thundu in the Dedza district of central Malawi is startling after two hours of driving through a parched brown landscape.
Rain has not fallen in months. But an underground spring has been capped here and streams from the new pond diverted to irrigate small fields where 'Irish' potatoes, onions and beans are growing.
After kicking out a piece of the low dirt wall of a narrow hand-dug channel where water flows to demonstrate how his tiny patch is irrigated, Msaiwale Lefoti yanks a healthy-looking onion from the ground and proudly says his onions will double in size over the next two weeks. When he harvests, it will be several uncertain months before the next harvest. These crops will help feed his family during "the hungry season," he says.
He will sell some of these crops at the market. But when asked where the market is, Lefoti explains that he will put what he can on his bicycle and push his load almost 25 kilometers over the mountain terrain to a site near Lake Malawi.
Lefoti is better off than most villagers who have enough surplus to sell in the market. He has a bicycle. But the arduous journey he faces will bring him little income, and makes it instantly clear that more than bad or uncertain weather keeps Malawi villages poor. And the effort here in Thundu, helped by CARE International field workers who visit regularly, is barely a first step toward breaking the cycle that traps these villages in poverty.
One huge piece of Malawi's food crisis is the development crisis. Poor farmers don't have the roads or the transportation to reach potential markets with significant amount of goods to lift them past the subsistence point. "Getting prices right" was the dominant theme of structural adjustment policies, says Eleni Gabre-Madhin of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. Attention needs to be paid to "getting markets right." That means roads and transportation systems, timely information, access to credit and technical assistance including extension services from government. All of this will take money that Malawi does not have.
"The underlying explanation for the food crisis [in Malawi and Southern Africa] is more complex and cannot be solved through relief measures alone," said CARE president Peter D. Bell in a report to staff and board members last month after returning to the United States from a visit to Malawi that included a visit to Thundu.
A decade ago, Malawi began slipping into "long-term structural poverty," Bell said. Schools, vulnerability to killing diseases, "inefficient and unproductive" farms, and limited employment opportunities are all problems that have to be tackled.
Malawi was hit by serious drought in 1991-92 also, recalls Suresh Babu, an analyst with IFPRI. He worked in Malawi for five years. "The capacity to organize, at the country level, a set of people who can identify the problem, analyze the information that is coming from the field -- meaning grassroots -- and design solutions in order to prevent famine is not there."
International agencies come in to design long-term development plans, notes Babu. The question is: "Who implements the plan? Those who do not understand exactly what's in the plan and who do not develop the plan in the first place. So if you do not have the local capacity to design programs that are needed to solve your own problems you are always going to be dependent on external capacity to come and tell you what to do, and that's exactly what happened in terms of the IMF group.
Just before the current food crisis, Babu says, the IMF advised Malawi to sell some of its 167,000 ton strategic grain reserve to help offset budget deficits. A European Commission study in 2000 had concluded that a maize buffer stock of between 30,000 and 60,000 metric tons "would be sufficient to address a localized disaster," according to an IMF fact sheet. The size of this reserve was based on the assumption that an early warning system would signal impending crisis 6-9 months ahead.
So Malawi sold off virtually all of its reserve. However, the Fund offers as an explanation, the early warning system did not signal the current crisis because of flawed agricultural statistics. "The failure of the system became only apparent in February 2002, when Malawi ran out of food," says the Fund.
Furthermore, having depleted its reserve, Malawi found that the bad harvest of 2001 made it impossible to replenish stockpiles, forcing the country to import 150,000 metric tons of maze from South Africa. But this arrived late, "because of logistical problems," says the IMF.
"This is not really a problem of IMF," says Babu. "It's a general problem of donors coming in and telling governments what to do, while at the same time governments do not have the capacity to understand and say, 'I think this is what we should be doing.'"
When a drought or famine occurs, donors ask governments in affected countries how much food is needed. But the governments lack the capacity to do that, so donors end up saying how much they will contribute. "That's how food aid is organized," Babu says.
Much of the time, governments respond after the fact, and that's often too late. Malawi's National Food Reserve Agency's Board of Directors fired its general manager citing incompetence and insubordination, while also accusing him of undermining the authority of the board by granting the interest-free sale of maize on credit from the national strategic grain reserve to private traders. It is not yet CLEAR where the money from the grain sales ended up.
Part of the problem is that non-authoritarian government is still relatively new in Malawi. "As far as I have seen," says Chief Godfrey Chisamba in drought-sticken Malili Village, "there is lack of seriousness on the part of the government in terms of agriculture. In my area not a single motorized pump has been given to any of the communities. We are relying on donors."
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Uncertainty about making stronger demands prevails. "Yes, we can't rely on donors forever," says Chisamba, "but what else do we do now?"
Until multi-party elections were first held in 1994, government was by one-party rule. Civil society is still weak in Malawi, says CARE Malawi's education project manager, Norman Tembo. "In the traditional setup here, people are taught to respect authority, So sometimes it is not very easy to question authority openly."
But despite "some elements of the old one party system trying to creep in," he doesn't feel threatened by the current government, and that's an "encouraging" difference from the old dictatorship of Hastings Banda, says Tembo. IN the government's poverty reduction strategy paper, "they have clearly stipulated that they would like to encourage the civil society to be involved in the monitoring of government expenditures," he says.
Insofar as CARE is concerned, says the development agency's president, Peter Bell: "Increasingly we have trained our staff in what we call a 'rights-based approach' to development. We believe that communities not only have needs and responsibilities but they also have rights. They must have the capability to advocate to advance those rights."
