The New York Times has up an amazing story of an African country which turned itself from a net beggar to a net exporter of food by doing one simple thing. They defied Western "experts" and instituted a fertilizer subsidy program which mimicked those in place in the USA and Britain. Typically, the World Bank refuses to grant loans to countries which subsidize fertilizer, so most nations try to make due with depleted soil and wind up starving.
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...In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.Here is proof yet again that the best way to succeed is to do what is proven to work, and not what bureaucrats theorize in office buildings. Of course, we still need to see what happens long-term, but for the moment the people of Malawi is fed and even able to bring in some capital by exporting food.
3 comments:
What a great story. It's great to see that government intervention can be a positive thing sometimes.
I don't really understand the donor's position to grow cash crops and import food. It seems that if you've got bad soil, nothing is going to grow - cash crop or not. In some ways it seems like a system set in place to keep them dependent upon the west for food - I'm trying to not be cynical enough to believe that though.
Given some time, hopefully this will become the standard for poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. Seems like the old adage of "give a man a fish he'll feed himself for a day, teach him to fish and he'll feed himself for a lifetime" except with fertilizer.
I actually understand the thought. There are plants that will grow in bad soil. (I am drawing a blank on the standard ones, but I think Tobacco is among them.) But the problem is that people have to be TAUGHT how to grow these crops, which is not something most African nations are set up to do. Instead, this method allows them to do what they are familiar doing, get fed, and then be ready to be taught new things.
It is hard to learn when you are constantly thinking of how to avoid starvation.
it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs being proven true all over again.
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