The first green revolution and the lesson of Malawi

by Alan Bush

Malawi, one of the world’s most welcoming cultures and poorest nations, struggles to provide for itself in the wake of the “green revolution.” The plight of Malawian farmers mirrors that of India’s rain-fed farmers. As India prepares for a second green revolution, it would do well to learn from the failure of intensive agriculture in Malawi.

Malawi is among the ten most impoverished countries, according to the UN Human Development Indicators (HDI) index. Most Malawians live on less than $180 a year, have a life expectancy of less than 40 years, and 40% of the population is described as chronically malnourished.

Lacking a manufacturing base providing wage jobs, Malawi never developed cities of any size. As fertility rates rose in Malawi as they did elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa in the last fifty years, the population ballooned from under 4 million in 1960 to 12 million in 2000. Lacking cities and the lure of their employment, Malawi has become the most densely populated rural space in Africa. For more than 85% of the population, subsistence farming is their main or only form of livelihood. Malawi defines the biomass economy, where the lifeblood of the nation depends upon a stable and healthy relationship with the land.

Despite this, even in a year of good rains Malawi has an agricultural shortfall, and has become heavily dependent upon outside aid agencies to provide food security. How does a nation of farmers become unable to feed themselves?

It wasn’t always like this. For much of the early twentieth century, Nyasaland, as it was called before independence, was thought of as a success case to be emulated in southern Africa. It had a flourishing export economy of tea and tobacco, and the subsistence farmers were producing decent yields based on the old system of extensive, shifting cultivation. It seemed like the perfect place for the green revolution to capitalize on the gains that Malawians had made and create a thriving nation of farmers. So what happened?

The answers are at once complex and brutally simple. Without over romanticizing the hardscrabble agrarian lifestyle of Malawians at the turn of the century, their traditional knowledge systems had, like in India, created a human ecosystem which lived more or less in balance with the constraints placed upon it by nature.

Add to this tenuous balance the great sycophantic battle of the twentieth century : keeping up with population growth. In the words of geographer James Reck of Golden West College, “these people had an agricultural system that had been sustainable for centuries before we came along and showed them how not to die. At one point their total fertility rate hit 7.9; the population tripled within almost a generation. No agricultural system can adapt to such growth.”

The traditional Malawian system of agriculture, based on extensive, rotational cropping was something that functioned at a population density an order of magnitude less than exists today. With such an increased productive demand on every centimeter of cultivated soil, “they have no choice but to farm intensively.” How could Malawi, and the world, stop the rolling boulder?

Enter the Green Revolution.

When Jim Reck lived in Malawi in the late nineteen-sixties, the transition to intensive farming was already underway. “The government started a master farmer scheme. Selected farmers were given some training, equipment, chemicals, etc. The hope was that their increased productivity would catch the eyes of their neighbors, and magically everyone would suddenly be more productive and live happily ever after.” To a degree it was true; the intensive farming model caught on like wildfire and in the years directly after the introduction of intensive farming, yields improved—for a time.

Intensive agriculture as it was practiced in Malawi represented a paradigm shift. Farming was now a cottage industry in the biological manufacture of crops, where seed, plus nutrients, plus water, plus sunlight equaled a bumper crop. Moreover, it demanded these inputs in a precise balance with consistent availability of significant quantities. The problem was that scarcity of nutrients and variability of rainfall defined Malawian ecosystems, not quantity and availability. This scarcity and variability meant that while yields increased during the 1970’s, it did so by mining the accumulated wealth within the ecosystem. Since there wasn’t much it didn’t last long.

By the time I arrived in Malawi in 2001, it was clear that intensive agriculture was a failure. At night the skyline was a dull orange, aglow with thousands of field fires as farmers tried to recapture the nutrients from last year’s stalks. During the day, dust storms swirled across exposed fields, taking their stalks and topsoil off to Mozambique. Though the rise and fall of the green revolution occurred in between, the productivity of an acre of farmland is little better today than it was fifty years ago.

Moreover, they cannot revert to their previous method of cultivation because the ecosystem stability it depended upon is now gone. The village elder from Mzimba, a frail old man of 80, put it best: “there is no soil here anymore. There is only dust in which we plant our seeds, and pray to god the trucks might arrive with fertilizer, and the rains might arrive, so we might have another year of miracle.” Malawian farmers are stuck in a sort of liquidity trap : the way you're doing things doesn’t cut it, and you’re too poor to switch strategies.

That intensive industrially minded agriculture is a failed principle and not just a failed application of a potentially viable strategy is illustrated by the exceptions that prove the rule. Malawian plateau farmers thought they had it made. They have richer soils, fewer pests, higher rainfall and solid aquifers, and better growing temperatures. As the revolution arrived, their yields were spectacular, drawing specialists from throughout southern Africa to see their achievement. The ambition to reach the land’s full potential pushed the utilization ever higher, clearing forested areas and compacting cultivated plots. At first gradually and later rapidly, slope erosion destroyed the soil quality, and the necessary increase in fertilizer and pesticide usage to compensate rendered their groundwater unusable. The removal of buffer species and the loss of surrounding habitat invited new pests, and yields fell to little better than the surrounding plains.

Malawi illuminates the lesson of the green revolution as this : any system of agriculture that does not play by the local ecological rules is ultimately unsustainable. Whether we are ready to acknowledge it or not, agriculture functions within the confines of an ecosystem. The places with better soils, irrigated lands, and richer farmers may be more resilient to its risks that are introduced by not playing by the rules, but in the long run even there the costs eventually become apparent. We will always be better off to fit our needs within the logic of the existing ecosystem rather than trying to impose a new system, because every time we push too hard on the boundaries the ecosystem will collapse.

Malawi is a canary in the mineshaft. A concentrated experiment in a small nation in switching to a non-ecological farming resulted in collapse. What this proves is that any successful development strategy must also be built upon an ecological framework as the foundation of our agriculture. Without a shift in philosophy back to seeing farming as partnership with an ecosystem, even the most productive farmlands in the world suffer.

One of Malawi’s greatest losses from the green revolution was the complete disappearance of the old ways. With it was lost the understanding that Malawians held about the rules to each particular ecosystem. That old wisdom was the bedrock upon which a successful partnership between each village and its ecosystem could be built.

Journeyman Misfit