AIP taking Malawians nowhere
The Department of Disaster Management Affairs (Dodma) has announced that Malawians are expected to foot K76 billion food bill to feed 3.8 million food insecure people in the next five months. The amount represents 70 percent of the investment Malawi Government pumped into the 2021-22 Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP), a government initiative aimed at achieving food security by providing vulnerable households with subsidised inputs.
Despite criticism and advice from several quarters on how the programme is implemented and the need for government to find an exit strategy for the programme which clearly has not yielded anything, such advice has often fallen on deaf ears. The government has been adamant to review the programme and find a lasting solution to the perpetual perennial food shortage that Malawi faces.
Part of the reason why this programme still exists today despite evidence on the ground that it is somehow poorly managed and a waste of resources is pure politics. This is a programme that every individual aspiring for the presidency dangles at poor Malawians who often have few choices or none at all when it comes to food. For a majority of Malawians, food is maize and nothing else.
Maize is a heavily politicised crop such that anyone who says anything to the contrary in terms of alternatives to maize, is deemed unMalawian and heartless. As for politicians, well, try during campaigns to say that Malawians need to diversify their food crops and see if you will get a vote. There is a need for a mindset shift.
By now, surely, even the President knows that this AIP is a white elephant but he is forced to keep it intact for fear of losing political popularity and subsequently, votes. In the end, Malawians keep paying heavily for something that is not achieving its intended goals.
The biggest mistake in the implementation of the AIP, just like Fisp, is in the targeting of beneficiaries. I do not believe that government has done a good job in assessing the beneficiaries. If they did, they would know that most of the target beneficiaries have very small land, very small that even if they were to grow maize twice a year, hunger will still bite them hard. And then, most of the beneficiaries are aged. The intention is good but the targeting is wrong.
With an aging population of Malawian farmers, it’s clear that agriculture needs to attract more young and energetic people.
A report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) says that the exodus of rural youth to urban areas—where they come looking for green pastures, means fewer small-scale farmers left in the rural areas. It also means few small-scale farmers for tomorrow, potentially drastically changing the profile of agriculture.
In Malawi’s case, the land is often readily available at no cost in rural areas.
The government needs to attract the youth to agriculture by incentivising it in such a way that the youth start to look at agriculture the same way they look at engineering or medicine. Again, make deliberate policies that facilitate access to markets.
As a country, it is high time that the government put in deliberate policies and mechanisms to mechanise agriculture. If we keep on using stone-age tools for farming, Malawi should forget ever getting out of this perpetual hunger.
The government needs to get it right with targeting, modernising and incentivising agriculture, especially for large-scale farmers. Agricultural subsidies in their current form are not helping alleviate hunger among millions of Malawians instead, the programme is enriching suppliers of the inputs more than the intended beneficiaries who are the ordinary Malawians.
