Food crisis to hit 3.7M

Extreme weather conditions, including the recent Tropical Cyclone Freddy will undermine food security throughout this year and expose about 3.74 million to hunger, a 2023 Global Report on Food Crises shows.

The report, supported by the European Union, says 19.35 percent of the country’s population will yet again face hunger this year due to poor harvest, high food prices and low household purchasing power, among other factors.

Reads the report in part: “Sustained pressure from drivers such as conflict, economic shocks and weather extremes as well as lack of social support or opportunity to recover from shocks will exhaust people’s abilities to cope.

“This, in turn, will drive further deterioration in household food security and increase reliance on external assistance to manage growing consumption gaps.”

The report says in the absence of successful recovery and development initiatives, there will be a perpetual need for urgent humanitarian action and a growing risk of deteriorating into a food emergency.

In February, before Cyclone Freddy struck Malawi on March 12, Ministry of Agriculture preliminary crop estimates projected a 360 000 metric tonnes (MT) maize surplus this year as the country was expected to produce 3.56 million MT of the staple grain against the national requirement at 3.2 million MT.

However, agriculture experts believe the anticipated surplus will not be enough to have a positive impact on food prices.

Speaking in an interview, Malawi Agriculture Policy Advancement and Transformation Agenda (Mwapata) Institute research fellow Anderson Gondwe said considering that the cost of fertilisers and demand for food remains high due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the surplus offers no hope that prices of the staple grain will ease.

He said: “Globally, food prices have been increasing since 2020 driven by wheat, maize and sunflower largely supplied by Ukraine, but now faced with a global shortage perpetuated by the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Again, there are high expectations that maize will fetch higher prices because of higher fertiliser prices and also due to the fact that the Affordable Inputs Programme has been under pressure.”

National average prices of maize reached new all-time highs by January 2023. The prices were underpinned by tight domestic supplies, currency weakness and high prices of energy that inflated production and distribution costs.

The Global Report on Food Crises has since called on the government to act as households are already unable to meet their minimum food needs and are forced to engage in coping strategies that will harm their future ability to access food and sustain their livelihoods.

“The failure to accelerate progress on addressing the drivers of acute food insecurity and undernutrition is perpetuating a system of reliance on humanitarian aid that was not designed or resourced to respond to cyclical and predictable shocks at such scale.

“Earlier intervention can reduce food gaps and protect assets and livelihoods at a lower cost than late humanitarian response,” it reads.

The Global Report on Food Crises follows the World Bank’s Food Security Outlook for March 2023 which projected a food price crisis especially rising maize prices.

Maize prices have been on the rise, increasing by about 300 percent within a year from an average of K9 500 per 50 kg bag in January last year to about K40 000 per 50 kg as of April 30 2023.

Agricultural development policy analyst Tamani Nkhono Mvula said authorities must put in place measures to avert the looming hunger crisis.

He said: “The cyclone disaster will definitely have an impact on food prices, a situation which requires authorities to prepare for the worst and consider mitigating factors such as winter cropping to ensure availability of food.

“We also need to ensure that institutions such as Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation [Admarc] and National Food Reserve Agency [NFRA] have enough maize to flood the market because if they do not, then indeed food prices, which are largely constituted by maize, will be high this year.”

In a separate interview, Consumers Association of Malawi (Cama) executive director John Kapito on Thursday urged the government to cushion the poor by, among others, boosting social cash transfer programmes as well as encouraging early planting.

During Labour Day commemorations last Monday, President Lazarus Chakwera said Cyclone Freddy damage and loss exceed $500 million or about K518 billion.