New report on Malawi’s agricultural breakthrough
Emerging from the worst harvest in a decade, the Government of Malawi implemented one of the most ambitious and successful assaults on hunger in the history of the African continent. The core innovation was a national voucher program that enabled the country’s smallholders, most of whom grow their staple food maize on less than one hectare (2.5 acres), to buy improved seed and fertilizer at well below the market prices. Through this program, maize production in Malawi doubled in 2006 and almost tripled in 2007. The program is now in its fourth year.
Decades of intensive cultivation by smallholders, in the absence of significant fertilizer use, have depleted Malawi’s soils of nutrients, particularly nitrogen. During the 20 years to 2005, national yields of maize have averaged 1.3 metric tons per hectare (t/ha). In contrast, the average yield of rain-fed maize in Iowa in the United States (1997–2007) has exceeded 10 t/ha.
Prior to the subsidy program, over half of Malawi's farming households operated below subsistence. Because of low productivity and small farm size, only 20% of maize farmers produced a surplus and sold their product. The rest coped by reducing their daily maize consumption, increasing consumption of alternative calorie sources (such as cassava), selling their assets (such as livestock), and seeking employment on large commercial estates or in towns.
Food insecurity also encourages unsafe sexual practices leading to higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancies, and abortions. Gender and theft-related violence increase. School attendance usually drops during times of food shortage.
In a paper just published in the prestigious open-access journal, PloS Biology (link to the paper), Earth Institute rural development specialist Glenn Denning and colleagues in Malawi, Kenya and New York, documented and analyzed the Malawi input subsidy program. This program has helped lift Malawi from dependency on food aid to being a food-surplus nation, even supplying Zimbabwe with 300,000 tons of maize during its current crisis.
The paper also examined experience from the more intensively supported Millennium Villages project (MVP) in Mwandama in Zomba district of southern Malawi. With yields of 3.6 to over 5 t/ha, the results from Mwandama have demonstrated that there remains a very large yield gap between maize yields achieved at the national level (even with a substantial subsidy) and potential yields based on whole farm intensified support. The MVP provides a standard against which improvements in national productivity can be measured in future years.
Malawi has led the way in Africa in demonstrating the opportunities and challenges of implementing a national input subsidy program. With the impetus of recent high food prices and a softening of donor opposition to subsidies, several of Malawi's neighbors (including Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania) are now studying, adapting, and building on this experience to design and implement similar programs for improving agricultural productivity.
The country’s success has provided compelling evidence for an advisory group to the Madrid Conference on Food Security to recommend the establishment of a new Financing Coordination Mechanism (FCM). In its report released in Madrid on 27th January (link to the report), the advisory group, chaired by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, has proposed the FCM as a focal point for rapidly mobilizing and disbursing additional funding in support of programs like the one implemented in Malawi. Malawi's experience will continue to provide valuable lessons and inspiration for achieving and sustaining Africa's Green Revolution.