Malawi seems to be awash with corn. It has been the best harvest in a dozen years or more. So why in this time of historic plenty, is the rich world still sending its unwanted food to Malawi?
Malawi has had a rough decade. Staggering under the effects of an Aids epidemic that affects one in five of the population in some districts, there were famines in 2002, 2003 and one in 2005, when a third of Malawi's 13 million people ran out of food. Until this April, over 300,000 were still being fed emergency rations by the United Nations World Food Programme. Malawi deserved a good year.
But record harvests don't necessarily guarantee good times. "We have so much maize this year," says 59 year old Felicita Bailoni. "But we have a problem over where to sell it. It's not just that the price is so low because there is so much maize, there isn't anyone to sell it to. The traders normally visit the village but they haven't come." Even in the time of plentiful food she's worried. She and her husband Stephen look after her two grandchildren, whose mother died three years ago, and two other orphans.
Most households in their village, Kunthembwe, have taken in the children of those who have died from Aids - which is particularly severe here around Blantyre in southern Malawi. Felicita and her enlarged family have more than enough food for today and for the year ahead - but they need cash to pay the children's school fees, for clothes and other necessities. And maize corn is so plentiful at the moment it fetches only eight Malawian kwacha, or about 3p a kilo - if you can sell it. In 2005, the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo. The Bailonis are hoping to sell 100 50kg bags of corn ears. "But if we wait till the price goes up, the weevils will spoil our maize," says Felicita.
"The price is so low," says Charles Rethman, a Malawi-based analyst of what the NGOs call "food security"', 'that we have a concern now about next year. Farmers will be put off growing maize, and they won't have the cash to buy the seeds for the next planting. So in 2008 we're looking at the possibility of another food crisis. So it's really important that we do everything we can to get the price up to a level that rewards the farmers."
With so much cheap corn available Rethman is bemused by a US government deal, announced in April, to ship $19.5 million of American corn and soya to Malawi as food aid. "It's nonsense," he says.
Everywhere in the villages it is the the same story : Plenty of maize but no market. This affects the very poorest. Yet money is needed to pay for school fees, soap, clothes and for medicine.
At a primary school, hundreds of excited children, each clutching a large mug, are circulating around a camp of vast cooking stoves, 23 of them. Women in brightly-coloured wraps stir vats of grainy yellow porridge. This is CSB - corn-soya blend - a mix of maize meal and soya flour, vitamins and sugar widely used in emergency feeding around the world. Locally it's called likuniphala. For many of the children it's the first meal of the day and for some it will be the only one.
CSB is a wonderful product and the teachers are delighted. "Look at the children - they are now so energetic. They don't fall asleep in class. They don't fight over each other's food, like they used to. They're fatter!" says Gertrude Sonani, who teaches 13-year-olds. But the effect goes further than just feeding the kids. Children come to the school because of the meal - class numbers are up by about 7 per cent in every age group since the feeding programme began in January.
In a country where only 70 per cent of the children attend primary school, that's an achievement. At another nearby primary school, the head teacher, Annie Jana, said she now had 800 eight-year-olds, compared to 500 when the programme started a year ago. "Absenteeism has fallen, and even children who dropped out are coming back, especially girls." And in Malawi, getting girls into school has always been difficult, which is why half of all women are illiterate.
School feeding is such an obviously good idea that the aid agencies and the Malawian government have been bringing more and more schools into the programme since it began in 1999. Most of the CSB comes free from the World Food Programme (WFP), which uses donated corn and soya - some of it from the Malawian government - and more that it buys locally.
Impressed by all this, in April the US Government announced that it wanted to join in. It would give WFP nearly $20 million over three years to help fund an expansion of the programme so, from 2008, 650,000 Malawian children get a daily mug of porridge at school. At the same time it announced similar schemes for Kenya, Cambodia, Guinea and Pakistan. WFP applauds the deal.
But not everyone in the country was overjoyed. "It's very short-sighted - it doesn't make any sense. It's going to short-circuit the effort to improve nutrition here, it undermines farmers, households. It's not sustainable and it won't bring about any long-term change to malnutrition rates," said Charles Rethman, echoing many critics of the plan.
The problem is - though WFP left this detail out of their press release - that the US grant came with a condition : it had to be spent on American CSB to be bought from American farmers and put in American ships to be transported to Malawi. According to WFP, the cost of buying, transporting and packing the annual 8,000 tonnes of US CSB will be $812 a tonne. SIR, which will buy about 3,600 tonnes of Malawian CSB - likuni phala - this year, expects to pay around $320 a tonne (distribution costs add another 5 per cent). Simply, if the American money was spent in Malawi, it could feed nearly two-and-a-half times as many schoolchildren.
Said one angry aid worker : "This is giving aid with one hand and taking it away with another. It's the Big Man saying : kneel down before I give you the help. These people, they get the food, they are vulnerable, they clap their hands and say, "Thank you Mr. Bush". They don't understand what's really going on."
The World Food Programme's man in Malawi, Dom Scalpelli, defends this particular policy. WFP needs the US, from where 43 per cent of all the food aid WFP provides comes from. 98 per cent of it is 'in kind' - American corn, soya, rice, oil and beans, shipped at considerable expense to where it's needed. Says Scalpelli, "The child doesn't care if his porridge is Malawian or American. The important thing is that more of them are going to be getting it. And American CSB is cheaper than Malawian."
In fact the two cost about the same, but Scalpelli is being disingenuous. The price of shipping and administration - and it is US law that American companies are used for packing and shipping 75 per cent of American food aid - puts the cost of the US-sourced CSB at absurdly high levels. Only a third of the money granted for food aid actually goes on food - the rest is transport and administration. The US Congress's Government Accountability Office has criticised the system, saying that a $10-per-tonne cut in shipping rates would enable the feeding of 850,000 more people. Indeed, Malawi would have done better if the US Government had written WFP a cheque for cost of shipping and administering the grant, and not sent any American food at all.
Surely, Scalpelli was asked, it would be better if the Americans gave cash and you spent it in the Malawian market - you don't just feed the children but you also support Malawian farmers. Isn't it nonsense, when Malawi has just brought in a record-breaking harvest?
"Yes of course we'd have taken the money and yes, we could have sourced it locally. But the reality of what we're living through is that you take advantage of any grain you can get. The CSB is not displacing the local Malawian CSB - it's going to schools and it's being eaten, it's targeted and it's not going on to the market. The local farmers will still get business from us - and we'll still buy Malawian CSB."
"It's absurd," counters Charles Rethman. "You could feed twice as many children, create jobs, stimulate the maize price and help the farmers. Anything that will increase demand for farmers is a good thing : this flies in the face of the Malawian government's development strategy and its attempts to stand on its own two feet."
The story of how American corn gets in Malawian children's porridge begins in the great-plains states like Kansas and Iowa, where, as the American food policy critic Michael Pollan puts it, there is "a plague of cheap corn." It's a tale that begins in 1973, when the Nixon administration started directly subsidising corn (maize) farmers in a way that encouraged them to produce as much as possible. That policy has meant an ever-increasing excess of American corn, which most years costs the US taxpayer some $5-$10 billion to subsidise. As Pollan says, the money, which in 2005 kept the price of corn at around half what it costs to produce, is in effect a subsidy for the big American companies that buy and process the corn - and these companies and their political supporters are the ones that dictate American farm policy. Meanwhile the unwanted corn has to go somewhere - and dumping it abroad has always been one of the answers.
Some 20 per cent of US corn is exported, and at times the proportion going as food aid has matched that. In 2003 America provided 56 per cent of all the food aid in the world. But an indicator that the richest nation's motives are not entirely charitable is that, throughout those years, America's food aid volumes increased massively at times when prices in the US were depressed - up to 20 per cent of American cereals production goes abroad as food aid when the market is down, but when domestic prices are high this figure falls to just five per cent. In 1993, when global food aid reached an all-time high of 17.3 million tonnes (in 2005, the last year for which there are complete records the figure was 8.25 million tonnes), US prices of staples like corn and rice were at historic lows.
The many critics of American food aid make the point that the buying up of US farmers' surpluses is another way of subsidising them - and, most years, federal payments make up about half the income of the average Iowa corn farmer. Such unprecedented support puts up a wall against farmers from the developing world who want to sell in the markets of the rich. The European Union abandoned food aid in kind in 1999 - all but two per cent now goes as cash - and Peter Mandelson, as Europe's trade commissioner, has called for 'radical reform' from the Americans.
But this was generally seen as pretty hypocritical. Most aid-agency observers reckon the EU has used American intransigence as an excuse to put off reforms of European farm subsidies - like the notorious two euros a day each cow on the continent receives - again, a way of putting up a barrier against the farmers of Africa, South American and Asia. This produces real absurdities - it's often pointed out that the money the rich world gives in aid to poor countries, often to help improve agriculture, is worth less than what those countries could earn if Europe and America simply reformed their subsidies and opened up their markets.
"Emergency food aid in humanitarian situations is of course a good thing, but it can and does often do more harm than good," says Ann Witteveen, Oxfam's food security coordinator for southern Africa. "The very promise of free food can cause disaster-hit populations to leave their homes and move to refugee camps. They may become dependent on it, making it harder for them to take up their lives again when the disaster or danger has passed. Farmers leave their fields, prices fall and local traders lose their businesses. Clearly, while food aid saves lives in a disaster, it can hamper the return to normality."
Malawi itself has a blatant example of the damage that can be wrought by food aid. In 2002, a crisis was predicted, after a shortfall of 600,000 tonnes in the harvest. Unusually, the international community provided exactly what had been appealed for - but the sums were wrong. Malawi was flooded with cheap grain and the price of maize dropped from $250 a tonne to $100 a tonne during 2003. Malawian farmers suffered : the loss to the Malawian economy was estimated at $15m, and local production of not just maize but also of key crops like cassava and rice dropped massively. All this made it harder for Malawi to return to self-sufficiency when the crisis was over. Even last year, when Malawi had a 250,000 tonne surplus of maize, the US still shipped in over 40,000 tonnes of American food as aid.
From across the world, there are stories of how, once a dependency on food aid has been established and local production destroyed, the aid stops and commercial supply begins - not so different and hardly more moral than the tactics of a drug pusher. This has happened with American soya beans in the Philippines and Japanese rice in Jamaica. Subsidised dairy produce from Europe has, according to Oxfam, put milk farmers out of business in a number of Caribbean countries.
Food aid could be on the way out. Corn prices are high in the US this year, and the futures market is very excited at the prospects of using those great grain mountains for producing ethanol - bio-diesel - and thus addressing another of the rich world's pressing problems. Europe, Canada and Australia have all been persuaded to convert some or all of their food-aid programmes to cash, rather than in kind. Among the major donors only America, Japan and China hold out.
There is mounting pressure in the US for changes in the food-aid system, driven by a damning report from the US Congress about the inefficiencies. It highlighted the $171 a tonne that US carriers charge, compared with the $100 a tonne WFP can normally get from its own contractors. It also found that US food aid frequently is contaminated or infested by insects by the time it arrives in the country that needs it.
Increasingly, it seems, the developing world may take matters into its own hands. One government official in Malawi said that ministries there had not been informed about the this year's US grant, and would be very unhappy about it. Last year Eritrea, a food-aid addict for all of the country's brief and tragic history, declared that, for the dignity of its people and in order to end 'a culture of dangerous dependency', it would accept no more food aid.
"Food aid," says Mary Khozombah of Oxfam forcefully, "should be the last resort, in an emergency - and even then it should be bought locally if possible. Of course, if people say we want to give you food, we'll say yes - you can't say no. Poor nations like us too often just accept the charity without looking properly at the effects. But in the long term it really kills our people."
The Guardian
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