Transcript the_state_of_food_security_governance_in_malawi(1)

Henry Chingaipe, PhD
IPRSE
outline
 Introduction
 Conceptualising food security in Malawi
 Implications of the conceptualisation of food security
 FS governance: Policy debates and actors
 Some critical policy/governance issues
 Land use and land reforms
 Input programmes
 Parastatal Actors
 Donors and the food Security Agenda
Introduction
 FS is firmly established itself on Malawi’s national
agenda as the most visible and sensitive public policy
issue
 Malawians have continued to identify FS with national
self-sufficiency in maize production
 Maize availability and affordability dominate policy
discourses on FS and are contested across the political
divide and between donors and Malawian political
and technocratic authorities.
Intro cont’d
 FS questions have led to food electioneering
 FS has
partly made the legitimacy of the state or
government somewhat dependent on or linked to
maize availability and affordability.
 The objective of this presentation is to do a quick a
synopsis of the state of food security governance in
Malawi
Conceptualising food security
• Food security means different things to different policy
analysts
• Generally defined as the state “when all people at all
times have both physical and economic access to
sufficient food to meet their dietary needs for a
productive and healthy life”
• Essential elements are the availability of food and the
ability of people to acquire it
• Food insecurity means the lack of access to enough
food and it takes two forms, namely chronic and
transitory.
Conceptualising contd
 Chronic food insecurity is a continuous inability to acquire enough
nutritious food even when there is no general decline in food
availability.
 Transitory food insecurity is a temporary decline in the ability of
people to access enough food
 MGDS frames FS as a prerequisite for sustained economic growth and
poverty reduction
 key elements of FS availability, access and utilisation.
 All three are in cause-effect relationships with poverty levels so much
that vulnerability is a cross-cutting variable. How these four interact
give a food insecurity situation its unique character.
Conceptualising food Security
in Malawi
policy and governance implications
 Food insecurity as a public policy problem is simply a
mess: multiple causes, multiple actors and multiple
partial solutions.
 FS requires a holistic and inclusive implementation
approach: multi-sector efforts, central and local levels,
and among governmental, NGO, private sector and
donor communities. It requires a cross-sector
approach.
 A cross-sector coalition for FS requires political capital
and the technical capacity to coordinate FS and safety
nets across ministries, agencies and actors outside the
state.
Implications cont’d
 The FS components in Malawi are highly interrelated
because of large dependence on small holder
agriculture
 In the long term, sustainable food security is
dependent on the levels of socio-economic
development.
 Short term strategies that alleviate hunger and
vulnerability must be in sync with long term strategies
for economy wide economic growth and development.
Achieving the balance is not necessarily easy.

Policy debates on food security
 The first one is rooted in state-market debate. The sticky
issue is whether to rely on laissez-faire market solutions to
ensure access to food and to reduce vulnerability or on
economic entitlements and state-managed interventions.
 Recent FS achievements show that the choice is not about
perfect markets over imperfect states or perfect state over
imperfect markets. It is about treading the narrow aisle
between imperfect markets and an imperfect state.
 This requires sensitivity to the political economy context
and policy pragmatism that is not beholden to economic
dogmas
Policy debate cont’d
 The second debate is
about whether national selfsufficiency in maize should be the goal.
 Proponents argue that a landlocked country in a
politically unstable and volatile part of the world must
hedge against potential interruptions to maize
imports. Thus there must be increased household
production.
 This approach runs counter to a strong push for
export-led agriculture that would expand the revenue
base and create new industries to get people out of
subsistence maize production into a range of income
generating activities
Policy debate cont’d
 This debate represents a ‘social dilemma’ i.e.
a
collective action problem that arises when the rational
pursuit of narrow or sectional interests results in
collective irrationality.
 ASWAP presents a potentially viable mechanism for a
mutual settlement of this and other policy issues.
 In the meantime, maize self-sufficiency continues to
be the primary public policy goal vis-a-vis food
security (time horizons for politicians and poor people
are short!)
Actors in food security policy
areas
 The FS
policy arena is populated by various
government ministries, departments and agencies and
other stakeholders including CSOs and NGOs, donors
and producer associations.
 Some actors have diametrically opposed policy
interests in the FS agenda leading to policy battles.
 Similarly, there are normative and ideological
differences over approaches and strategies for
achieving FS within the donor community and among
various CSOs and NGOs working on agricultural
development and food security.
Actors cont’d
 This translates into lack of clarity on policy goals,
duplication of efforts and resources and sometimes,
divergent if not diametrically opposed strategies for
achieving FS.
 There is need for a more institutionalised and
inclusive mechanism for settling food security policy
questions beyond the FS Joint Task Force
 The ASWAP provides a useful entry point for such an
inclusive policy platform for FS.
Critical issues: Land reform
 Smallholder farmers produce up to 90% of the maize but
face serious land constraints.
 On average there are 2.3 rural people per hactare of
agricultural land compared to 0.4 people per hectare for all
sub Saharan Africa
 Land constraint is particularly severe in the Southern
region where around 75% of households, each cultivates
two acres (0.8 ha) or less.
 A recent study shows that an increase of 0.25ha per capita
of cultivated land would decrease the likelihood of food
insecurity by 22% in the north, 24% in the centre and 27%
in the south
Land Cont’d
 Besides interventions to increase food yield per unit of
land, land redistribution is an important reform for
food security especially when it is on record that about
25% of agricultural land owned by estates lies idle.
 A study on land alienation within the GBI shows land
transfers and changes in land use have potential to
undermine the food security agenda
 The GBI lacks operational guidelines on land use for
investors in order to balance between food and non
food crops and on exportation of food especially in
times of food availability decline.
Land cont’d
 Land reforms are well over due despite the existence of
a land policy
 There is need to negotiate a sustainable political
settlement over customary land to deal with questions
of ownership and tenure in a manner that encourages
investment in the land and guarantees social justice
and agro-based rural livelihoods.
Input programmes
 Input programmes have their own share of problems and
inefficiencies but have been a tremendous success in
achieving food security under President Bingu wa
Mutharika
 New York Times applauded Malawi for “ending famine [by]
simply ignoring experts”.
 The Guardian (UK) argued that “Africa’s green revolution may
be several steps nearer after a pioneering experiment in seed
and fertiliser subsidies to small farmers”
 UN observed that “in a few short years Malawi has come from
famine to feast: from food deficit to surplus; from food
importing country to food exporting country”
Input programme
 The FS success of the input programmes is that they
increase supply of maize and simultaneously reduce
demand, keeping prices low during the hunger period.
 Successful Input programmes remove the need for SGRs to
hold large amounts of buffer stocks. Achieving FS by SGRs
is expensive as it involves procuring, storing and
distribution for free or at subsidised prices large amounts
of maize. SGRs are also susceptible to mismanagement
and corruption.
 A key long term policy issue is whether continuation of
input programmes should go alongside construction of
new silos in some parts of the country?
Input prog cont’d
 There is lack of clarity on whether the input
programmes are for enhancing
productivity or for social protection.
agricultural
 This is because of the targeting criteria for beneficiaries
as well as a lack of the notion of graduating beneficiaries
from the programme
 However, input programmes are prone to fraud and
corruption at different levels:
 The vagueness of targeting criteria makes accounting for
the vouchers and the inputs difficult
 There are disparities between NSO and MoAI about the
population of farming families in rural Malawi. No sense of
urgency to reconcile despite independent census of
farming families in rural Malawi has been carried out.
 This allows vested interested to manipulate the
implementation of the programmes and carve out
benefits/spoils mostly for political patronage.
 Concerns about the awarding of contracts and
tenders for input programmes.
 A recent assessment found that competitive tendering
and award rules are not always adhered to for both the
inputs and transport:



award quantities kept changing between evaluation and
contract signature;
some bidders lost out completely without clear reasons;
some bidders who were disqualified at evaluation stage were
actually awarded contracts etc.
ADMARC & NFRA
 Ensuring food security means recognising the need for access to food in local markets at
affordable prices.
 A recent study has shown that food insecurity increases with increasing distance from a
weakly market in the northern region, and with increasing distance from an ADMARC
depot in the central region.
 It further shows that improving market access has potential to reduce food insecurity by
18 percent in the central region and 19 percent in the southern region
 The role of ADMARC in providing agricultural markets is well documented and its
political significance is recognised.
ADMARC and NFRA
 ADMARC’s price smoothing has been less than optimal. It
has continued to be an arena of political patronage, a
source of corruption reflected in reports of opaque maize
transactions and sometimes a disincentive to private sector.
ADMARC has a role in the food security agenda but its role
needs to be streamlined.
 The institutional relations between NFRA and ADMARC,
vis-a-vis food security need rethinking and streamlining.
For instance while the NFRA is responsible for managing
grain reserves, ADMARC is responsible for setting grain
prices.
ADMARC & NFRA Cont’d
 It is not clear in the current FS policy milieu whether
the objective for SGRs is for price stabilisation or just a
buffer stock to be released as welfare intervention in
lean times to chronically food insecure households.
Donors and the food security
agenda
 The ideological differences and normative policy inclinations of the
various international development partners involved in the food
security agenda are well known
 This obviously puts government in a difficult position in terms of how
to reconcile the conflicting world views while still being inclusive and
accommodative
 In practice a by-product of this is that the food security agenda has
been projectised. One recent count identified 192 food security projects
being implemented by different government departments and agencies
and nongovernmental organisations and financed by various donors
 the approach affects policy coherence at central government level and
there is yet to develop an institutionalised mechanism for harnessing
lessons from all the projects to feed into a more coherent and robust
policy
Donors cont’d
 The key issue here is that Government needs to continue
being assertive (demonstrated with FISP) to reclaim its
legitimate policy space.
 On their part, donors need to become more pragmatic and
conform to the principles of the Paris Declaration and
Accra Agenda for Action on Aid Effectiveness.
 Donors need to be more aware that achieving FS in Malawi
has become a profoundly political issue. Thus in addition
to technical arguments about effectiveness and efficiency,
their approaches must continuously be informed by solid
political economy analysis to avoid rupturing a fragile state
in a fragile society.
conclusion
 FS continues to be equated to national self-sufficiency in maize
production
 The food security agenda is affected by policy incoherence and
ideological differences among actors and stakeholders
 In order to sustain food security and maximise efficiency gains, the
paper calls for expedited land reforms and a rethink of land transfers
and land use under the GBI, a rethink of the roles of ADMARC and
NFRA and more clarity on the policy goals of the FISP.
 While the role of donors in the food security agenda is recognised, this
paper calls for donors to cede policy space to the government as food
security has become a politically charged public policy problem in
Malawi.