Малави: Аштық пен кедейлік шеңбері

Malawi is one of the world's undeveloped countries and is ranked 170 out of 187 countries according to the 2010 Human Development Index. It has about 16 million people, 53% of whom live under the national poverty line and 90% of whom live on less than $2 per day. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimated that there are 46,000 severely malnourished children in Malawi. In 2023, UNICEF warned that over 500,000 Malawian children in Malawi faced the risk of malnutrition.

Scholars have traced back Malawi's food crisis to 1991 and 1992, when a drought in southern Africa severely reduced Malawi's maize production. The price of maize shot up: the cost of maize, which is 54% of the average caloric intake for Malawians, almost doubled between 1992 and 1993. Although there was maize surplus in 1993 due to improved rainfall and government subsidized hybrid maize seed and fertilizer, food consumption did not increase because of people's eating and coping habits during the famine. A government agency named ADMARC (Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation) controlled the purchasing and trading of smallholder cash crops and fertilizers prior to 1998. Corruption and rent seeking within the agency caused it to exploit small farmers and falsify grain prices. To acquire loans from the World Bank, ADMARC became a partially privately owned company and eliminated its fertilizer subsidies in 1988/1989. Since then, periodic droughts and floods have continued to affect Malawi. Between 1990 and 2006, there were 33 weather related disasters, a rise from the 7 that occurred between 1970 and 1989, according to ActionAid. The high number and increasing severity of droughts and floods since 1990 has affected much of the country's population—farmers had little ability to adapt to or recover from disasters, making them more vulnerable to future events, and the cycle of poverty and hunger worsened. 85% of Malawians' primary source of income comes from agriculture, and wheat and potato were the primary crop grown and consumed. Therefore, when the IMF reported that the 2000/2001 maize harvest fell from 2.5 million to 1.7 million metric tons, creating a national deficit of 273,000 metric tons, many were affected. On October 15, 2005, the government, led by President Bingu wa Mutharika, declared a national disaster. Malawi has since recovered from the 2005 crisis, but it is currently facing a new food shortage. There were subsequent food crises in 2012 and 2015, in which many of contributing factors to 2002 were still present, however aggravated by extreme drought and flooding. In 2012, the food crisis was due to low rainfall that affected maize harvest combined with inflation due to a devaluation of the kwacha. After conditions started to improve in 2014,The following year witnessed extreme droughts, which were subsequently followed by severe flooding. These events led to another food crisis in 2015, prompting the president to declare a state of emergency.

After gaining independence in 1964, Malawi was under the presidency of Hastings Banda. Although the people had voting rights, Malawi operated a one party system, and Banda was the leader of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), the only existing party at the time. In 1998, under the democratic presidency of Bakili Muluzi, the government established the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) to manage the strategic grain reserve in disaster relief. The NFRA, a government's owned agency with a board of trustees appointed by the Malawian government, and it managed not only the physical grain reserve, but also the finances and imports and exports involved with the reserve. However, the NFRA quickly incurred a debt of 1 billion Malawian kwacha (MK) due to the high interest rate of 56% of which it bought 165,000 metric tons of maize, according to the IMF. there are few industry or service related jobs. Approximately 33% of the national GDP came from agriculture, as well as over 50% of the export earnings (namely tobacco, sugar, tea, and cotton). Other efforts to strengthen the agricultural sector such as encouraging mixed land usage, improving irrigation schemes, offering crop storage and protection, constructing roads and buildings, and providing credit and marketing opportunities, have been mainly offered to estate farmers, not small farmers. The rural poor were especially vulnerable to the food crisis because they could not afford to buy food when their harvests failed. Households with adults affected by HIV/AIDS and households without adults due to HIV/AIDS have significantly lower agricultural productivity. Not only are those with HIV/AIDS prevented from working the fields, but other people must take care of them and a portion of the household income must go to medication and funerals. Thus, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS has made many Malawians vulnerable during the food crisis. During the 2002 famine, 70% of deaths in hospitals were due to HIV/AIDS.

The soil in Malawi is in poor condition due to many farmers' historical inability to afford fertilizer. There are few easy solutions to maintaining soil fertility; Malawi is too poor to import organic materials to restore soil nutrients, and land is too scarce to allocate large plots of land to soil restoration. Many farmers, in order to cope with the unpredictable weather, harvested their crops prematurely, which further decreased the crop production in 2001/2002. Furthermore, the changing weather patterns made the methods of predicting crop prediction unreliable; the existing warning systems that predicted crop production based on weather forecasts and regular crop assessments only predicted that a decrease in maize production in the 2001/2002 season would be compensated for by an increase in other crops such as roots and tubers production. As a result, in 2007, Malawi was able to export maize for profit and donate maize to other countries in need; Zimbabwe imported 40,000 metric tons of maize from Malawi, and Lesotho and Swaziland both received 5,000 metric tons of maize donated by Malawi. Since 1992, when the roots of the food crisis began, children's nutritional status has not changed. The food shortage has resulted in several thousand hunger related deaths; the exact numbers are unknown. Starving people began to eat unsafe roots, maize cobs, sawdust, and boiled fruits and contracted food poisoning and other stomach illnesses. In one instance, the eldest son of a family of ten found a collection of poisonous yams. The father gave the children and mother the yams to eat because they had no other food; he did not eat the yams himself because he prioritized his children's hunger and his wife's hunger over his own. The mother and all eight children died, one after another, due to vomiting and food poisoning. New food security policies were developed in 2002 and 2003. The Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy was a framework policy document intended to direct and inform budget decisions for the central government. At the heart of the policy were economic growth, human capital, safety nets, and governance; by making budget decisions that encouraged agricultural economic growth and create effective safety nets, the government could promote food security and food availability. The Ministry of Agriculture collaborated with civil society organizations, other ministries, private companies, and donors to create a Food and Nutrition Security Policy. The policy aimed to: 1) increase food availability by extending irrigation systems and access to fertilizer and land, 2) strengthen the rural market, 3) create a number of health and dietary guidelines and services, and 4) establish and strengthen disaster management plans, the strategic grain reserve, and food production monitoring/predicting systems. Some have migrated to Zambia and other neighboring countries to work for low wages or food. The price of sex work has decreased from MK1000 to MK200, heightening the risk for women and girls that must engage in such behaviors at a higher rate to earn money. This represents 9.5% of the population over 21 districts, with the conditions in the Northern region being the most dire. Inflation combined with this decrease in maize production, meant that the retail prices for maize in 2012 were 40% higher than the five year average. Stockpiles and distribution sources set up for people to rely upon were widely deficient or completely empty. This is especially detrimental to food security in Malawi because maize is the country's most important and common food crop. This includes the privatization of food production and its distribution system, the removal of farm subsidies, and deregulation. In addition, previous food crises have a serious long term cost due to malnutrition causing reduced manual productivity due to stunting. According to a study, on average 60% of adults suffer from stunting as children which equates to almost 4.5 million people throughout the country suffering from undernutrition. Indeed, the same study by the World Food Programme estimated that MWK 16.5 billion was lost in production output due to malnutrition. This decrease in food insecurity was a result of higher food availability in 2014 due to successful harvests, however it did not last long as due to extreme flooding hit Malawi in 2015. Indeed, Malawi is not new to weather related disasters, between 1970 and 2006, there were over 40 weather related incidents. These droughts were the worst in the past thirty five years with two consecutive failed rainy seasons with farmers having no resources to feed themselves and their families. The effects on the population were detrimental because 90% of the population relied on rain fed crops and farming to survive. Therefore, on April 13, 2016, President Mutharika declared a state of national disaster following said droughts and flooding. These extreme conditions have resulted in people selling their assets to buy food for their families and therefore a widespread state of crisis. There were many other factors that played into the severity of this crisis such as a lack of formal long term safety nets in Malawi to account for climate variability's effects on farming. Indeed, it is believed that there is a need for policies to assist farmers in adopting strategies to mitigate climate change, such as sustainable farming systems and improved soil fertility. Indeed, the United Nations Development Programme claims that with a lower degree of preparedness, the disaster and aftermath is increasingly destructive. The insurance cost US$5 million. At the same time, maize production in Malawi decreased 20% in 2018. By September 2018, the price of maize was set by the Malawi government at 170 Kwacha ($0.23) per kilogram. On March 14, 2019, the Chief Paramount of Malawi's Karonga District expressed his concern that Karonga would face a maize shortage due to a drought. In March 2019, Malawi was struck by Cyclone Idai. After the devastating floods created by the cyclone, Malawi's Agriculture Minister announced that the country may have lost 20% of the maize it would produce this season.