MHRC reports ‘chaotic’ AIP to UN

Malawi Human Rights Commission (MHRC) has sought the United Nations (UN) intervention to push government to end “chaotic” implementation of the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP) as it threatens citizens’ right to food.

In a report to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the human rights policing body has also condemned the government for politicising the programme and sidelining people with disabilities.

The committee has for the past 12 months been receiving reports from governments and human rights organisations for selected countries ahead of its 72nd pre-sessional meeting this month.

MHRC writes: “The commission observes with concern that the AIP continues to implement in a chaotic manner a scenario which not only infringes on progressive realisation of the right to food but also revives the discourse around the utility and continuity of the programme.”

The report was uploaded on tbinternet. ohchr.org, the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies website.

It highlights challenges including “poor network; alleged corrupt practices; sparsely located AIP retailing centres making some beneficiaries including persons with disabilities, women and the elderly travel long distances as far as 20 kilometres to redeem their inputs.”

The others are “failure to redeem inputs due to   missing and expired national identity cards; absent suppliers; lack of civil society involvement and lack of effective complaints handling.”

The report said a recent research revealed that AIP “does not have clear strategies in place to ensure that persons with disabilities participate in the programme’s planning, implementation, and monitoring in the process perpetuating discrimination against people with disabilities.”

Meanwhile, the commission has asked the UN to recommend to government to ensure that AIP is more human rights based.

“[It should be] focusing only on the most vulnerable poor subsistence farmers without politicising it,” it adds.

MHRC further notes that AIP drains public resources while calling on the government to plan an exit strategy.

“Budgetary allocation towards programme continues to enjoy the lion’s share of the Ministry of Agriculture budgetary allocation. This has often raised issues of the sustainability of the programme and the real contributions towards ending food security…

“Government should hold AIP as a short-term strategy towards the realisation of food security, and should already start preparing an exit strategy and encourage citizens to do commercial farming and hence become self-reliant,” the report further reads.

Meanwhile, Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture chairperson Sameer Suleman has backed MHRC’s recommendations, hoping government will improve the programme if adopted.

He said in an interview on Wednesday: “It is true that people with disabilities are not considered in a special way. Everything nowadays is done with human rights consideration. And, it is true some Malawians’ rights are being violated in this programme.

“Some, especially the women and people with disabilities, are not able to access the inputs despite being subjected to long hours of waiting. Their right to food ends up being violated.”

On the call for AIP exit strategy, he said, there was a need to establish a system where farmers would graduate from subsidies after a stipulated period:

“I was in Kenya recently where I went to meet my counterpart on that side to learn how they are doing it. There is a system they are using called e-voucher input system. It is a graduating system whereby after three years, government stops giving subsidies and farmers graduate.

“I like it because it gives what farmers need, not the universal type where when you are growing sugarcane, they still give you fertiliser for maize.

“I want to sell the idea to Malawi. I know it and I have told the Minister of Agriculture today that we need to bang heads and see what we can do for our country. Definitely, we need to redo our AIP,” he said.

The Ministry of Agriculture had not responded to our questionnaire as we went to

 press. However, on reforming the programme, the responsible minister Sam Kawale in an interview with our sister paper Weekend Nation of March 11 2023 insisted that government had been explaining the issue of the redesigned programme in various statements such as President Lazarus Chakwera’s national address in October 2022 and the AIP launch in November 2022.

Chakwera announced in October last year government’s intention to overhaul the programme to make it more targeted and efficient, a statement he repeated in his State of the Nation Address (Sona) on February 17, 2023.

In his Sona, the President said it had become evident in the programme’s three years of implementation that it continues facing challenges including ineffective targeting of beneficiaries, high cost of farm inputs and delayed procurement.

Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs Sosten Gwengwe in his budget presentation two weeks ago also mentioned that AIP—which with an allocation of K117 billion is K8 billion more than the previous year’s allocation—would undergo various necessary reforms to enhance targeting, efficiency and mitigate all risks.

The 2022 Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee Annual Assessment estimated that 3.8 million people in over 845 000 households may still not meet their food requirement during the 2022/23 consumption period