TALKING POINT: Malawi food experts question emergency aid system
By Ruth Gidley
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Eunice James works on a cassava garden in Imedi village, near Salima, 125km from Lilongwe.
REUTERS ALERTNET/RUTH GIDLEY
IDERI, MALAWI (AlertNet) – Southern Africa is gearing up to get food rations to millions of people whose survival has been stretched to the edge by repeated drought, but food experts say emergency aid only keeps crises at bay for a year at a time.
More than half the regional population survives on less than $1 a day, so any extra hardship can easily push them into crisis. Repeated emergencies make people more at risk of permanent destitution, aid workers say.
“We pat each other on the back for having just saved lives. But we’ll be back next year,” Sam Chimwaza, Malawi country representative of the U.S. AID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network, FEWS NET, told AlertNet. “People are already asking if this year is a rehearsal for next. We are really not addressing the underlying causes.
“Despite all the assistance over the years, why is it that we are still seeing people falling into poverty?” Chimwaza asked. “Food aid hasn’t actually helped the people we intend to help.”
Malawi’s annual gross national income per capita is $170, and almost 42 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, according to the U.N. Development Programme.
Chimwaza said donors in North America were too ready to send food aid around the world on a journey that could take up to six months, instead of giving cash for Malawi to buy maize much closer to home.
“Food aid is a business. They’ve got companies invested in shipping,” he said.
About 75 percent of food aid donations were in the form of food in 2004. The United States, one of the largest donors, gives 99 percent of its food aid in the form of surplus grains from its own farmers.
“Why can’t they give money to buy it?” Chimwaza asked. “South Africa has maize but hasn’t given us grains, it’s given us cash. While we are suffering here, and we appreciate the food that comes, we are starting to ask questions.”
HAND-TO-MOUTH
ActionAid, an aid agency which focuses on development but also addresses emergencies, says nothing will change unless emergency measures look to the medium-term as well as the short-term.
Edson Musopole, Action Aid Malawi’s food security adviser, said every time there is a shortage, people start eating into the resources they need for the following year’s harvest, selling livestock and using seeds for food.
“With each crisis, there’s a new level of vulnerability being created,” he said. “Unless we can address this, our mitigation will only be shortlived and we will need to keep repeating ourselves.”
Musopole said that by targeting aid at the poorest of the poor, children, the elderly and people with HIV/AIDS, relief agencies were keeping people afloat, but not doing anything to make the country stronger.
“We don’t want only a hand-to-mouth situation. We want to help people to be able to feed their families and also produce enough to supply the market so that food could be available on the market when required,” he said.
“We’ve had five years of subsidies just to lift people up to where they can effectively function. If we’re serious about avoiding this happening, improved support to smallholder farmers is the answer.”
Musopole said aid donors should look more to helping people find ways of getting cash to invest in fertiliser and irrigation.
There have been shortages of subsidised fertiliser in Malawi in recent years, and farmers say it’s hard to produce good crops without it.
Only 2 percent of Malawi’s arable land is irrigated, according to the African Studies Center at the U.S. University of Pennsylvania, even though it lies alongside a huge freshwater lake, Lake Malawi.
CASSAVA GARDEN
Musopole said countries such as Malawi were destined to lurch from crisis to crisis because people depended on one or two staple crops – maize in particular -- which were vulnerable to erratic weather patterns.
He said communities needed to start growing a wider range of crops, such as sweet potatoes, pumpkins and cassava, which are strong enough to withstand poor rains and could be harvested just when the hungry season was starting to bite.
This is no easy task in a region where a version of “nsima” -- a thick porridge of maize meal -- is the basis of virtually every meal.
But in the village of Imedi, in the central region of Salima, about 120km northeast of Lilongwe, villagers with help from the Malawi Red Cross have planted a cassava garden that could make the future brighter.
Despite serious food shortages in the area, the villagers have resisted the temptation to harvest the roots for immediate sustenance and are patiently waiting until they are big enough to distribute as seedlings so that people have something else to turn to when times are tough.
Eunice James, one of the farmers, said: “I’d prefer maize. But if you go to the market you have to scramble for maize and the prices are very high.”
Another farmer, Oscar Salim, said: “When the rainfall’s difficult, at least we’ll have something to eat.”
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