Independence Without Food Is Meaningless

Article Author: Gospel Mwalwanda in Lisbon, Portugal (Malawi News Agency - 10th December 2007)
Article Source: The Malawi Nation Newspaper

President Bingu wa Mutharika [of Malawi] on Saturday reiterated that it does not make any sense for a country to be independent and yet goes on begging for food.

Mutharika was speaking at a special side event organised by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan´s Alliance for a Green Revolution (Agra) at the European Union-Africa summit in Lisbon, Portugal.

The event, called Partnerships for a Green Revolution in Africa, was organized to discuss Africa’s agriculture and Agra’s work.

Also present were Burkina Faso president Blaise Compaore, Annan, and a top official from the African Development Bank.

Mutharika said food has been vital for mankind from biblical times. He recalled people of those days were able to perform their everyday activities because they were food secure.

He said even when the international community imposed sanctions on the then white-ruled Southern Rhodesia after it unilaterally declared itself independent, the sanctions did not work because the country had food.

Mutharika said Africa needs a revolution to transform the agriculture sector, adding he is already doing it here at home through the fertiliser subsidy programme and other agricultural strategies.

The President said at first when he introduced the programme, it was " a big battle because subsidies are taboo in international circles." However, he went ahead and gave vulnerable farmers seed and fertiliser at reduced prices.

He said the programme is bearing fruits because for the second year running, the country has registered surpluses. He said his government has also created an internal market infrastructure for distribution and buying crops. Irrigation has also been intensified because the country’s rainfall pattern is unpredictable, he added.

"Malawi is not poor. We are poor by choice. We could get out of it," he emphasised.

Annan said agriculture is the mainstay of most African economies, pointing out that 70 per cent of the continent’s employment is on the farms.

The former UN chief asked African governments to put in place right policies that would benefit their people. —Malawi News Agency

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Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts

Article Source: The New York Times 2nd December, 2007
Article Author: Celia W. Dugger

Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

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