Quote (Answer) from Peter Harrold, World Bank, Ghana from Sector Wide Approaches: Do They Really Help The Poor? – Proceedings of a Regional Forum 13 to 16 November 2001, Accra, Ghana
Question: Why are Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) focused on poverty reduction and not on wealth creation?
Answer: Because you can have economic growth and wealth in a country without alleviating poverty, and therefore it is important to focus on poverty.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Big Tobacco in Malawi
The following article chronicles some of the challenges in the agriculture sector with regard to child labour in Malawi.
Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi
by Pilirani Semu-Banda, Special to CorpWatch February 25th, 2008
Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi's northern region. The farms sell their produce on the country's auction floors directly to international corporations including Limbe Leaf Tobacco, majority owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company and U.S.-based Alliance One Tobacco. Kirana is one of 250 million children across the world involved in work that is damaging to their mental, physical and emotional development. Some 57 million of these endangered children live in Sub-Sahara Africa. And with an estimated 1.4 million child laborers, the small, southern African nation of Malawi has the highest incidence of child labor in southern Africa, according to the Olso, Norway-based, FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science. Kirana was eight years old when he first went to work in the fields. Estate owners transported him and his parents from their home village, Mulanje, along with 45 other families. The truck journey covered more than 1,000 kilometers and ended in the tobacco fields in Rumphi in northern Malawi. Kirana's mother, Jane Kapito, 45, says the family left home seeking a better life. “Four years later, my whole family is still struggling with poverty. My son has to work as hard as everyone else if we have to afford the basic necessities. The money that my husband and I receive from the tobacco estate is not enough,” she says. Now 12, Kirana has never been to school. For the past six months, his health has been failing and he can no longer work as hard as he used to. His mother says her little boy is malnourished and therefore contracts different infections easily. The family often goes without a proper meal for up to three days. “Just in the past two months, Kirana has been afflicted by malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia,” Jane Kapito said. “He's my only child and I am so scared of losing him.” This family's struggle is repeated throughout Malawi's tobacco industry, where poverty ensures that every member must contribute to the workload. Virginia Import Now Main Malawi Export Malawi's sprawling tobacco estates are not only a source of national economic pride, but of lovely pastoral vistas as well. Up close though, the sight of child laborers in the hot fields exposes the ugliness at their core. Commercial production of tobacco in Malawi goes back as far as 1889, when settlers from the U.S. state of Virginia introduced the crop. In those days “foreign masters” forced the native people and their children to work in the farms for little or no pay. Over a century later, this exploitation continues -- with no end in sight. Increasingly, critics are demanding that the tobacco companies take responsibility for ending the abuses. Given their key role in Malawi's economy, they wield significant clout. Malawi derives up to 70 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from agricultural crops, and the tobacco industry makes up 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Malawi’s exports account for five percent of the world's total tobacco exports and two percent of the world's total production. But the wealth generated by this resource is not spread evenly across the country. The Malawi Tobacco Control Commission (TCC), a local government watchdog for the tobacco market, estimates that it takes $1 for farm workers to produce a kilogram of tobacco, which they usually sell at $.70 for a loss of $.30 per kilo. Hardworking farmers who cannot make a living turn to child labor. TCC's 2008 campaign is demanding that farmers get a profit at least 15 percent above production costs. Despite the TCC campaign, farmers and their families are still at risk of losing money on their crops. And this year the farmers' plight may be further exacerbated by heavy rains that are predicted to cut the country's tobacco production by about 3 percent. Tenant Farmers’ Dilemma Up to two million Malawians, mostly poor, depend on tobacco and related industries for their income. Virtually all of the up to 900,000 adult growers are “smallholder farmers, tobacco tenants and casual farm workers,” according to a 2006 research paper by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE), an independent center based at the University of California, San Francisco. Tenant farmers are allocated a plot of land by the estate owner and required to produce a specific yield. The owners loan the tenants inputs including seed and fertilizer and deduct the debt from future profits -- if any. The owners are also supposed to supply food rations, but when monthly allocations run out, workers and their children go hungry. Many also lack such basic necessities as medication, proper housing and safe drinking water. Not surprisingly, workers on tobacco estates and their dependants are among the poorest and most oppressed people in Malawi, according to a survey released last December by the Center for Social Concern, a Catholic organization that monitors the welfare of the people. A minimum of “78,000 children are working on a full- or part-time basis in the tobacco fields, according to the CTCRE study. “Forty-five percent of the child workers are 10-14 years old and 55 percent are 7-9 years old,” the study found. Meanwhile, the tobacco companies have received nearly US$40 million in revenues over four years through the use of unpaid child labor in Malawi. In 1995, the Malawi government, through the Ministry of Labor in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice, started drafting a Tobacco Tenancy Labor Bill to regulate the relations and transactions between the tenant farmers and the landlords. The bill has been taken through a number of revisions but it has not yet been taken to Parliament. Supporting Children or Exploiting Them? Multinational tobacco companies are aware of the public relations implications of profiting not only from tobacco itself, but doing it through the cycle of poverty and child labor. Tobacco companies in Malawi including Alliance One, Africa Leaf (Malawi) Limited, Premium and British American Tobacco (Malawi) are sponsoring the Eliminating Child Labor in Tobacco Growing Foundation (ECLT). The project, which includes other agricultural industries, is run by Together Ensuring Children Security (TECS), a registered trust set up in 2001 by tobacco exporting corporations operating in Malawi: Africa Leaf, Dimon, Limbe Leaf and Stancom Tobacco. In 2001, ECLT budgeted US$2 million for a four-year effort to combat child labor. Six years later, in October 2007, the 20 companies within the supply chain of the tobacco industry had ponied up somewhat less than $100,000 of that amount, according to TECS'S corporate newsletter. The University of California researchers are skeptical of the inherent conflict of interest in having tobacco companies influence social policy. They concluded that in Malawi, transnational tobacco companies are using child labor projects to enhance their corporate reputations and distract public attention away from how they profit from low wages and cheaply produced tobacco. Others argue that even when useful, the TECS program is a drop in an ocean of poverty. Up to 45 percent of the population is poor, according to the 2007 Malawi Millennium Development Goal (MDG) report. Registered as a Trust under the Trustees Act of Malawi, TECS projects have taken what it calls “a poverty reduction strategy approach” to improve food security, water safety and HIV/AIDS intervention and education. The trust has built schools, planted trees and constructed shallow wells to address the use of child labor in tobacco farming, according to TECS Programs Director Limbani Kakhome. While not directly undermining child labor, these programs will eventually bear fruit in better social conditions that will diminish the problem, Kakhome said. “We are also addressing health issues to ensure that the children don't skip school because of illnesses,” says Kakhome. Once they stay home because they are ill, they are easily taken up by child labor.” It is difficult, he said, to supply the market for child labor once the children are absorbed into the school system, have safe water and are financially secure. Too Little, Too Late? It is too late for children like 15-year-old Martha Kalima who dropped out of school at 12 years old to work in the tobacco fields. Pregnant at 14, she continued working in the fields until she gave birth. The father was the 16-year-old son of another tenant farmer. “There is nothing like maternity leave for tobacco workers,” Kalima said. “No one is entitled to sick leave nor is there transport to hospital. I gave birth at home because it was too late for me to get to hospital.” Martha is back in the tobacco fields carrying the baby on her back. Chances are slim that she will return to school. Some 15 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys drop out of school, according to Malawi government statistics. Around 22 percent of primary school age girls never attend school at all, while 60 percent of those enrolled do not attend regularly. The TECS corporate newsletter confirms that children with few options are pulled from school. Some are “coaxed from the poverty-stricken homes to work in order to keep body and soul together. They are exposed to hazardous environments where they work long hours and do jobs not befitting their ages and they are often beaten and abused.” That was the fate of 16-year-old Ekari Maliwasa, says she has just returned to her village in the south of Malawi after working for five years in the tobacco estates in the northern part of the country. “My parents took me with them to work in the tobacco estates in the north [when I was 11] and I only escaped back to my village two months ago after realizing that I was being abused. I am now staying with my elderly grandmother,” says Maliwasa. She says the estate manager beat her whenever he found her resting from the hard work in the tobacco fields. Ekari also went without food or drink for long hours, she said, and was not allowed take a break until she had worked for five hours. Enforcement of Labor Standards Difficult Maliwasa's treatment, like that endured by many of Malawi's child laborers, violated not only international standards but also legally binding treaties. Malawi is a signatory to a number of conventions against child labor including the 1973 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 138 which sets a minimum working age of 18, and the 1999 ILO Convention 182 which outlaws child labor. The country also ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (ILO has set 2016 as the deadline for countries around the world to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.) Child labor cannot be ended overnight says TECS Executive Director Bobby Maynard. “You can manage the supply chain to a certain degree but you can't control it fully,” he says. “The problem is that over 80 percent of tobacco is grown with no contracts from the tobacco companies -- as such it is difficult to intervene directly.” Tobacco companies note that they are involved in policing child labor violations at estates where they have direct control, and that they subscribe to Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), whose first principle is “no child labor.” But their results in curbing the practice have not been impressive. Relying on British American Tobacco's own internal documents, the University of California study found that, “rather than actively and responsibly working to solve the problem of child labor in growing tobacco, the company acted to co-opt the issue to present themselves over as a 'socially responsible corporation' by releasing a policy statement claiming the company's commitment to end harmful child labor practices, holding a global child labor conference with trade unions and other key stakeholders, and contributing nominal sums of money for development projects largely unrelated to efforts to end child labor.” International agencies are also involved. Kusali Kubwalo, communications officer for UNICEF Malawi, said the United Nations has joined Malawi's government and several non-governmental organizations to fight the problem from several fronts. A national “Stop Child Abuse Campaign” aims to break the silence shrouding all forms of child abuse, including child labor. “The campaign aims to mobilize leadership and a commitment at all levels to prevent and respond to all forms of abuse,” says Kubwalo. “Violations of children's rights take place every day in Malawi and are extensive, under-recognized and underreported.” She insists that Malawi, as a signatory to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is obligated to respect, protect, facilitate and promote the fulfillment of the rights it guarantees. “This instrument must therefore be translated into concrete legislation, interventions and development programs,” says Kubwalo. “Ratification alone is not enough.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publishing this article, Project Manager and Acting Director of ECLT Foundation, Mr. Alain Berthoud, issued a response.
Response to “Playing with Children’s Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi"by Alain Berthoud, ECLT Foundation Acting DirectorMarch 10th, 2008
Letter to the Editor of CorpWatch in response to CorpWatch article posted on their website on 25 February 2008 Dear Editor, On 25 February Corporate Watch published an article called “Playing with Children’s Lives: BigTobacco in Malawi", signed by Pilirani Semu-Banda Working with the ECLT Foundation as acting Director, and on behalf of the Foundation Board, I would like to make the few following comments which we would like you to add to your article and post on your website.
I remain at your disposal to further discuss ECLT’s mission and activities at your convenience ECLT is cited in the article, but was not contacted for comment. Therefore, as key donor to the mentioned project, we would like to describe in more detail who we are and the project activities. We hope this gives your readers a better perspective. ECLT is a sectorwide alliance grouping the major manufacturing and tobacco processing multinationals together with the growers associations, the global trade union federation dealing with agriculture and tobacco (IUF), and the program for the elimination of child labour, IPEC, of the ILO.
These members have agreed to work together to address the child labour issue in different regions of the world, acknowledging that none of them could individually solve such a complex problem. It is therefore a collective effort against child labour that goes beyond the very specific interests of each single actor. The collaborative efforts, commitment and community engagement of the ECLT are not shown in the article and are an important component in trying to make an impact on the serious issue of child labour. Concerning the ICLEP –Integrated Child Labour Eliminating- project that we support in Malawi, your article does not really explain our approach in addressing the issue of child labour in a global and integrated manner; nor does it discuss the concrete results and achievements, which are quite significant at local level.. Let us provide you with the following data; at the end of the present 4-year project (by mid 2010), with 4 million dollars invested, we will have reached about half of the children population in the concerned areas (15’000 children) or over 2/3 of the child population considered to be potentially involved in child labour. Although needs are immense, we do believe this is more than a drop in the ocean and that it certainly constitutes an example of what can practically be done to fight child labour when interested parties come together in a collaborative fashion. Anyone who has been in this region understands the need for adequate infrastructure, specifically schools. Although it is not exactly the tobacco companies’ core competency to set up schools, via our project tobacco companies together with the other ECLT partners have taken this on. 28 schools blocks have been built or renovated; teachers’ houses have been built to attract and keep the teachers motivated; local authorities and teachers are being trained in order to improve the quality of education. Child labour committees are in place in each community to fight child labour and to monitor children attendance at school; As a result enrolment rates increased by 20% during the first phase of the project, and continued to increase by 12% in the last year during which 500 children, strictly non-school going child labourers, and another 1’100 at risk children, have entered school. Sensitisation is done at all levels; at parents and community level to change attitudes regarding child labour as well as with district officials (including labour inspectors). This also means ECLT and its local partners are taking on the role of facilitating the implementation of the international conventions that, as you rightly say, Malawi has ratified. Poverty is an important cause, as well as the result, of child labour. Beyond the usual approach consisting in withdrawing children from work situation and reintegrating them in school, the ECLT funded project considers the living conditions of the parents so that they can afford to let their children go to school.
The following activities are undertaken:
Access to safe water and sanitation; 22’000 people have now access to a safe water source (topped shallow well or borehole) within a 500m range from their homes. Unfortunately, the burden of fetching water often falls to the child, and mostly girls. The project reduces this burden as well as prevents them from catching waterborne diseases.
Food security; A small scale irrigation scheme has been developed (600 treadle pumps supplied) together with crop diversification to ensure food security at the community level. It goes along with soil conservation and reforestation (300 nurseries, over 2 million trees planted). The burden of fetching wood also falls to the children, something the project attempts to alleviate by making a sustainable supply of firewood available.
Health; Malaria, and above all HIV/AIDS are widespread and certainly play a role in child labour. The project has set up outreach clinics tending to the community needs and training community agents for health prevention. A clinic was built in the project area –in Kasese- and works in collaboration with the existing government infrastructure. In only a few months, the public at large has been provided with tens of thousands of medical consultations. The holistic approach of the project is implemented together with the community leaders, the districts officials in charge of education, health, agriculture, etc… 500 of them have been associated with the project and trained on child labour issues in order to build capacity and to ensure the dynamic of the project will be sustained. At management level, oversight of the project as well as the sharing of good project practices and lessons learned is secured through a project steering committee on which key actors are serving (unions, growers, companies, ministry representatives) or acting as advisors (IPEC/ILO, Unicef, NGOs); it is chaired by the Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Labour. We are proud of the ECLT supported project in Malawi and believe it is an example of what can be done to fight child labour when cooperation of all interested parties is realized. Whether it is too little is a legitimate question, but the ECLT strives to establish demonstrably effective projects that can be 'scaled up' and adopted by other public and private organisations, to reach a much larger number of children and families. The ECLT believes the best approach to make progress on this serious issue is the one of focus and collaboration, and we welcome discussions with others that share that concern. Alain Berthoud ECLT Foundation acting Director, Geneva 4 March, 2008
Playing with Children's Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi
by Pilirani Semu-Banda, Special to CorpWatch February 25th, 2008
Sickly and malnourished, Kirana Kapito began his working life on a large commercial tobacco estate in Malawi's northern region. The farms sell their produce on the country's auction floors directly to international corporations including Limbe Leaf Tobacco, majority owned by the Swiss-registered Continental Tobacco Company and U.S.-based Alliance One Tobacco. Kirana is one of 250 million children across the world involved in work that is damaging to their mental, physical and emotional development. Some 57 million of these endangered children live in Sub-Sahara Africa. And with an estimated 1.4 million child laborers, the small, southern African nation of Malawi has the highest incidence of child labor in southern Africa, according to the Olso, Norway-based, FAFO Institute for Applied Social Science. Kirana was eight years old when he first went to work in the fields. Estate owners transported him and his parents from their home village, Mulanje, along with 45 other families. The truck journey covered more than 1,000 kilometers and ended in the tobacco fields in Rumphi in northern Malawi. Kirana's mother, Jane Kapito, 45, says the family left home seeking a better life. “Four years later, my whole family is still struggling with poverty. My son has to work as hard as everyone else if we have to afford the basic necessities. The money that my husband and I receive from the tobacco estate is not enough,” she says. Now 12, Kirana has never been to school. For the past six months, his health has been failing and he can no longer work as hard as he used to. His mother says her little boy is malnourished and therefore contracts different infections easily. The family often goes without a proper meal for up to three days. “Just in the past two months, Kirana has been afflicted by malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia,” Jane Kapito said. “He's my only child and I am so scared of losing him.” This family's struggle is repeated throughout Malawi's tobacco industry, where poverty ensures that every member must contribute to the workload. Virginia Import Now Main Malawi Export Malawi's sprawling tobacco estates are not only a source of national economic pride, but of lovely pastoral vistas as well. Up close though, the sight of child laborers in the hot fields exposes the ugliness at their core. Commercial production of tobacco in Malawi goes back as far as 1889, when settlers from the U.S. state of Virginia introduced the crop. In those days “foreign masters” forced the native people and their children to work in the farms for little or no pay. Over a century later, this exploitation continues -- with no end in sight. Increasingly, critics are demanding that the tobacco companies take responsibility for ending the abuses. Given their key role in Malawi's economy, they wield significant clout. Malawi derives up to 70 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from agricultural crops, and the tobacco industry makes up 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Malawi’s exports account for five percent of the world's total tobacco exports and two percent of the world's total production. But the wealth generated by this resource is not spread evenly across the country. The Malawi Tobacco Control Commission (TCC), a local government watchdog for the tobacco market, estimates that it takes $1 for farm workers to produce a kilogram of tobacco, which they usually sell at $.70 for a loss of $.30 per kilo. Hardworking farmers who cannot make a living turn to child labor. TCC's 2008 campaign is demanding that farmers get a profit at least 15 percent above production costs. Despite the TCC campaign, farmers and their families are still at risk of losing money on their crops. And this year the farmers' plight may be further exacerbated by heavy rains that are predicted to cut the country's tobacco production by about 3 percent. Tenant Farmers’ Dilemma Up to two million Malawians, mostly poor, depend on tobacco and related industries for their income. Virtually all of the up to 900,000 adult growers are “smallholder farmers, tobacco tenants and casual farm workers,” according to a 2006 research paper by the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE), an independent center based at the University of California, San Francisco. Tenant farmers are allocated a plot of land by the estate owner and required to produce a specific yield. The owners loan the tenants inputs including seed and fertilizer and deduct the debt from future profits -- if any. The owners are also supposed to supply food rations, but when monthly allocations run out, workers and their children go hungry. Many also lack such basic necessities as medication, proper housing and safe drinking water. Not surprisingly, workers on tobacco estates and their dependants are among the poorest and most oppressed people in Malawi, according to a survey released last December by the Center for Social Concern, a Catholic organization that monitors the welfare of the people. A minimum of “78,000 children are working on a full- or part-time basis in the tobacco fields, according to the CTCRE study. “Forty-five percent of the child workers are 10-14 years old and 55 percent are 7-9 years old,” the study found. Meanwhile, the tobacco companies have received nearly US$40 million in revenues over four years through the use of unpaid child labor in Malawi. In 1995, the Malawi government, through the Ministry of Labor in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice, started drafting a Tobacco Tenancy Labor Bill to regulate the relations and transactions between the tenant farmers and the landlords. The bill has been taken through a number of revisions but it has not yet been taken to Parliament. Supporting Children or Exploiting Them? Multinational tobacco companies are aware of the public relations implications of profiting not only from tobacco itself, but doing it through the cycle of poverty and child labor. Tobacco companies in Malawi including Alliance One, Africa Leaf (Malawi) Limited, Premium and British American Tobacco (Malawi) are sponsoring the Eliminating Child Labor in Tobacco Growing Foundation (ECLT). The project, which includes other agricultural industries, is run by Together Ensuring Children Security (TECS), a registered trust set up in 2001 by tobacco exporting corporations operating in Malawi: Africa Leaf, Dimon, Limbe Leaf and Stancom Tobacco. In 2001, ECLT budgeted US$2 million for a four-year effort to combat child labor. Six years later, in October 2007, the 20 companies within the supply chain of the tobacco industry had ponied up somewhat less than $100,000 of that amount, according to TECS'S corporate newsletter. The University of California researchers are skeptical of the inherent conflict of interest in having tobacco companies influence social policy. They concluded that in Malawi, transnational tobacco companies are using child labor projects to enhance their corporate reputations and distract public attention away from how they profit from low wages and cheaply produced tobacco. Others argue that even when useful, the TECS program is a drop in an ocean of poverty. Up to 45 percent of the population is poor, according to the 2007 Malawi Millennium Development Goal (MDG) report. Registered as a Trust under the Trustees Act of Malawi, TECS projects have taken what it calls “a poverty reduction strategy approach” to improve food security, water safety and HIV/AIDS intervention and education. The trust has built schools, planted trees and constructed shallow wells to address the use of child labor in tobacco farming, according to TECS Programs Director Limbani Kakhome. While not directly undermining child labor, these programs will eventually bear fruit in better social conditions that will diminish the problem, Kakhome said. “We are also addressing health issues to ensure that the children don't skip school because of illnesses,” says Kakhome. Once they stay home because they are ill, they are easily taken up by child labor.” It is difficult, he said, to supply the market for child labor once the children are absorbed into the school system, have safe water and are financially secure. Too Little, Too Late? It is too late for children like 15-year-old Martha Kalima who dropped out of school at 12 years old to work in the tobacco fields. Pregnant at 14, she continued working in the fields until she gave birth. The father was the 16-year-old son of another tenant farmer. “There is nothing like maternity leave for tobacco workers,” Kalima said. “No one is entitled to sick leave nor is there transport to hospital. I gave birth at home because it was too late for me to get to hospital.” Martha is back in the tobacco fields carrying the baby on her back. Chances are slim that she will return to school. Some 15 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys drop out of school, according to Malawi government statistics. Around 22 percent of primary school age girls never attend school at all, while 60 percent of those enrolled do not attend regularly. The TECS corporate newsletter confirms that children with few options are pulled from school. Some are “coaxed from the poverty-stricken homes to work in order to keep body and soul together. They are exposed to hazardous environments where they work long hours and do jobs not befitting their ages and they are often beaten and abused.” That was the fate of 16-year-old Ekari Maliwasa, says she has just returned to her village in the south of Malawi after working for five years in the tobacco estates in the northern part of the country. “My parents took me with them to work in the tobacco estates in the north [when I was 11] and I only escaped back to my village two months ago after realizing that I was being abused. I am now staying with my elderly grandmother,” says Maliwasa. She says the estate manager beat her whenever he found her resting from the hard work in the tobacco fields. Ekari also went without food or drink for long hours, she said, and was not allowed take a break until she had worked for five hours. Enforcement of Labor Standards Difficult Maliwasa's treatment, like that endured by many of Malawi's child laborers, violated not only international standards but also legally binding treaties. Malawi is a signatory to a number of conventions against child labor including the 1973 International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 138 which sets a minimum working age of 18, and the 1999 ILO Convention 182 which outlaws child labor. The country also ratified the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. (ILO has set 2016 as the deadline for countries around the world to eliminate the worst forms of child labor.) Child labor cannot be ended overnight says TECS Executive Director Bobby Maynard. “You can manage the supply chain to a certain degree but you can't control it fully,” he says. “The problem is that over 80 percent of tobacco is grown with no contracts from the tobacco companies -- as such it is difficult to intervene directly.” Tobacco companies note that they are involved in policing child labor violations at estates where they have direct control, and that they subscribe to Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), whose first principle is “no child labor.” But their results in curbing the practice have not been impressive. Relying on British American Tobacco's own internal documents, the University of California study found that, “rather than actively and responsibly working to solve the problem of child labor in growing tobacco, the company acted to co-opt the issue to present themselves over as a 'socially responsible corporation' by releasing a policy statement claiming the company's commitment to end harmful child labor practices, holding a global child labor conference with trade unions and other key stakeholders, and contributing nominal sums of money for development projects largely unrelated to efforts to end child labor.” International agencies are also involved. Kusali Kubwalo, communications officer for UNICEF Malawi, said the United Nations has joined Malawi's government and several non-governmental organizations to fight the problem from several fronts. A national “Stop Child Abuse Campaign” aims to break the silence shrouding all forms of child abuse, including child labor. “The campaign aims to mobilize leadership and a commitment at all levels to prevent and respond to all forms of abuse,” says Kubwalo. “Violations of children's rights take place every day in Malawi and are extensive, under-recognized and underreported.” She insists that Malawi, as a signatory to the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is obligated to respect, protect, facilitate and promote the fulfillment of the rights it guarantees. “This instrument must therefore be translated into concrete legislation, interventions and development programs,” says Kubwalo. “Ratification alone is not enough.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publishing this article, Project Manager and Acting Director of ECLT Foundation, Mr. Alain Berthoud, issued a response.
Response to “Playing with Children’s Lives: Big Tobacco in Malawi"by Alain Berthoud, ECLT Foundation Acting DirectorMarch 10th, 2008
Letter to the Editor of CorpWatch in response to CorpWatch article posted on their website on 25 February 2008 Dear Editor, On 25 February Corporate Watch published an article called “Playing with Children’s Lives: BigTobacco in Malawi", signed by Pilirani Semu-Banda Working with the ECLT Foundation as acting Director, and on behalf of the Foundation Board, I would like to make the few following comments which we would like you to add to your article and post on your website.
I remain at your disposal to further discuss ECLT’s mission and activities at your convenience ECLT is cited in the article, but was not contacted for comment. Therefore, as key donor to the mentioned project, we would like to describe in more detail who we are and the project activities. We hope this gives your readers a better perspective. ECLT is a sectorwide alliance grouping the major manufacturing and tobacco processing multinationals together with the growers associations, the global trade union federation dealing with agriculture and tobacco (IUF), and the program for the elimination of child labour, IPEC, of the ILO.
These members have agreed to work together to address the child labour issue in different regions of the world, acknowledging that none of them could individually solve such a complex problem. It is therefore a collective effort against child labour that goes beyond the very specific interests of each single actor. The collaborative efforts, commitment and community engagement of the ECLT are not shown in the article and are an important component in trying to make an impact on the serious issue of child labour. Concerning the ICLEP –Integrated Child Labour Eliminating- project that we support in Malawi, your article does not really explain our approach in addressing the issue of child labour in a global and integrated manner; nor does it discuss the concrete results and achievements, which are quite significant at local level.. Let us provide you with the following data; at the end of the present 4-year project (by mid 2010), with 4 million dollars invested, we will have reached about half of the children population in the concerned areas (15’000 children) or over 2/3 of the child population considered to be potentially involved in child labour. Although needs are immense, we do believe this is more than a drop in the ocean and that it certainly constitutes an example of what can practically be done to fight child labour when interested parties come together in a collaborative fashion. Anyone who has been in this region understands the need for adequate infrastructure, specifically schools. Although it is not exactly the tobacco companies’ core competency to set up schools, via our project tobacco companies together with the other ECLT partners have taken this on. 28 schools blocks have been built or renovated; teachers’ houses have been built to attract and keep the teachers motivated; local authorities and teachers are being trained in order to improve the quality of education. Child labour committees are in place in each community to fight child labour and to monitor children attendance at school; As a result enrolment rates increased by 20% during the first phase of the project, and continued to increase by 12% in the last year during which 500 children, strictly non-school going child labourers, and another 1’100 at risk children, have entered school. Sensitisation is done at all levels; at parents and community level to change attitudes regarding child labour as well as with district officials (including labour inspectors). This also means ECLT and its local partners are taking on the role of facilitating the implementation of the international conventions that, as you rightly say, Malawi has ratified. Poverty is an important cause, as well as the result, of child labour. Beyond the usual approach consisting in withdrawing children from work situation and reintegrating them in school, the ECLT funded project considers the living conditions of the parents so that they can afford to let their children go to school.
The following activities are undertaken:
Access to safe water and sanitation; 22’000 people have now access to a safe water source (topped shallow well or borehole) within a 500m range from their homes. Unfortunately, the burden of fetching water often falls to the child, and mostly girls. The project reduces this burden as well as prevents them from catching waterborne diseases.
Food security; A small scale irrigation scheme has been developed (600 treadle pumps supplied) together with crop diversification to ensure food security at the community level. It goes along with soil conservation and reforestation (300 nurseries, over 2 million trees planted). The burden of fetching wood also falls to the children, something the project attempts to alleviate by making a sustainable supply of firewood available.
Health; Malaria, and above all HIV/AIDS are widespread and certainly play a role in child labour. The project has set up outreach clinics tending to the community needs and training community agents for health prevention. A clinic was built in the project area –in Kasese- and works in collaboration with the existing government infrastructure. In only a few months, the public at large has been provided with tens of thousands of medical consultations. The holistic approach of the project is implemented together with the community leaders, the districts officials in charge of education, health, agriculture, etc… 500 of them have been associated with the project and trained on child labour issues in order to build capacity and to ensure the dynamic of the project will be sustained. At management level, oversight of the project as well as the sharing of good project practices and lessons learned is secured through a project steering committee on which key actors are serving (unions, growers, companies, ministry representatives) or acting as advisors (IPEC/ILO, Unicef, NGOs); it is chaired by the Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Labour. We are proud of the ECLT supported project in Malawi and believe it is an example of what can be done to fight child labour when cooperation of all interested parties is realized. Whether it is too little is a legitimate question, but the ECLT strives to establish demonstrably effective projects that can be 'scaled up' and adopted by other public and private organisations, to reach a much larger number of children and families. The ECLT believes the best approach to make progress on this serious issue is the one of focus and collaboration, and we welcome discussions with others that share that concern. Alain Berthoud ECLT Foundation acting Director, Geneva 4 March, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Seeking Africa's Green Revolution.
The article below from the BBC gives a good overview of the agricultural situation in Malawi over the last few years and the impact of the most important policy decision the Malawian government has maken recently. We are currently working on tracking the successes of the described subsidy programme so that the weaknesses can be acted upon in order to make it a more effective and efficient programme. The president of Malawi has won two awards in the last few months in relation to the subsidy programme despite resisitence from organizations such as the World Bank initially. Whether it is sustainably long term is yet to be seen but it is an interesting experiment that seems to have resulted in more food for Malawians.
Seeking Africa's green revolution
From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - a minor agricultural miracle.
By applying a mixture of crop breeding, soil management, irrigation and diversification, agro-science experts are helping subsistence farmers to cope with climate change and buck the trend in neighbouring African countries.
BBC science and environment reporter James Morgan has gone into the field to meet the families who are sowing the seeds of a uniquely African green revolution - one which is as kind to the environment as it is to the economy.
SUNDAY 05 OCTOBER - SIZING UP MALAWI'S MIRACLE
"If [environmentalists] lived for just one month among the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals."
So said Norman Borlaug, one of the founding fathers of the original Green Revolution - credited with wiping out starvation in Asia.
But can technology really be the saviour of Africa's struggling farmers? It has become a terribly unfashionable opinion in the UK, where "green" campaigners are no longer content to denounce GM crop trials. They simply rip them up.
"Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy," said Borlaug. "Starvation is."
I have decided to take Norm up on his wager, by coming to Malawi to see for myself.
Because no matter how many UN reports I've ploughed through, grasping the root cause of the current "food crisis" in Africa is anything but straightforward.
And neither is my journey to Malawi - a sweaty overnight haul which takes me via Kenya, Zambia, and several re-runs of Indiana Jones films. But for heroic inspiration, I look instead to a speech by Kofi Annan, the new chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) - a $200m, pan-African programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations.
"Let us generate a uniquely African Green revolution," says Annan, cutting a heroic pose on my crumpled transcript. "There is nothing more important than this."
It is difficult to argue. Over the last 50 years, African farmers have laboured in the heat, while countries like Mexico, India and the Philippines have undergone a green revolution - applying novel fertilisers and pesticides to churn out bumper harvests of new high-yield varieties of wheat and rice.
Empowering farmers
Meanwhile, Africa has been cultivating greater and greater poverty statistics.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where per capita food production has steadily declined.
The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing
Malcolm Fleming
One third of Africans are malnourished. Soils are among the most depleted on Earth. Farmers do not have access to productive seed varieties and those that do have neither the knowledge nor the tools to reap the harvest. Slash and burn still reigns.
Climate change is forecasting ever more variable rainfalls, and more frequent droughts. Add in soaring fuel prices and the scourge of HIV/Aids, and the average African finds himself surrounded in the kind of perilous predicament which from which even Harrison Ford would struggle to escape.
But it is this very challenge that has drawn the world's crop scientists and agro-economists to Malawi. They hope to pioneer novel farming systems that propel Africa towards a new era of food security.
It has already been dubbed by members of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as "a greener revolution".
"Greener" because it works with ecosystems, not against them. A revolution that is "pro-poor and pro-environment", in the words of Mr Annan.
The talk around the conference tables is of "empowering" subsistence farmers to find their own, local solutions - farming techniques which are sustainable, affordable and tailored to local soils, markets and eating preferences.
Over the next week, I'll be taking a look at these projects first hand - catching fish in the desert, planting strange trees in the middle of maize crops.
I'm wondering how women and men, who have been sowing the same maize seeds for generations, really feel about the new hybrid varieties of seeds which are more nutritious, but also more hungry for expensive pesticide and fertiliser.
'Against the grain'
Most of all, I'm curious to find out whether the "miracle" we have read about here in Malawi is bona fide or illusory. Is the revolution underway, or a simple matter of better rainfall?
The facts are these. During the last decade, Malawi suffered six successive years of food shortage, culminating in 2005. One third of the population - 4.5million people - went hungry.
Step forward two years, and Malawi is exporting more than one million metric tonnes of maize, its staple crop.
The government, against the advice of the IMF and the World Bank, has handed out vouchers to 1.5m of the country's poorest farmers, enabling them to buy "inputs" - seeds, fertiliser and pesticides. Meanwhile, yields have mushroomed. Malawians are selling maize to Kenya and giving food aid to Zimbabwe.
The success was hailed last year with Oxfam's Malcolm Fleming describing to the BBC how Malawi was going against the grain of African agriculture.
So when I bump into Malcolm, a well-kent face in my native Scotland, on the flight to Lilongwe, I don't hesitate to offer a warm handshake of congratulations.
"I'm afraid that things have moved on since then," he sighs. "The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing."
Why? "That's the question," he continues. "The closer I look, the more complicated it becomes. But from what I gather, the maize is being sold abroad at greater prices, and that keeps the prices up in Malawi."
Malcolm is here doing research in the lead up to World Food Day on 16 October. Helping him to raise awareness is another familiar Scottish face, but I'm afraid I am sworn to secrecy. All will be revealed in due course.
"Rising food prices might not be much of a problem for me or you," says Mr Fleming, "but if you spend 80% of your household income on food, and then the price doubles..."
It is a welcome serving of realism pie to chew on as I step out of Lilongwe airport.
The pavements are covered in a blanket of purple blossom - it looks like a fairytale. And the boys cartwheeling down the red dirt roads seem full of beans. But the lumps in their bellies tell a different story.
MONDAY 06 OCTOBER - MAIZE EVERYWHERE
Piled 19 bags high; when I say bags, I'm talking about the kind of sacks you can dam rivers with.
I tried lifting one. At 50kg, that was a big mistake. I left that to the army of youngsters with Popeye biceps, who were loading Malawi's mammoth maize harvest onto lorries, bound for government sales depots around the country.
"If you came here just a few years ago, you would find this storage depot totally empty," says Feckson Kantonga, operations manager for the government-sponsored Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation (Admarc).
Feckson is standing at the foot of a pile of maize as tall a house. He has put his best suit on to welcome a Kenyan film crew, who had come from Nairobi to find out the secret of Malawi's success.
How exactly can it be, they are wondering, that their prosperous nation has come to depend on little old Malawi (the 13th poorest nation in the world) to supply its staple food crop?
"Malawi?" asks Peter, a business journalist. "We Kenyans know nothing of Malawi. I had to look the place up on Google to find out what the heck was going on here."
The answer is hidden inside the sacks. They are fat-packed with new hybrid corn varieties - strains that were unheard of in Malawi a decade ago.
Bred by multinationals in Malawi, or crop centres in Zimbabwe and Sudan, the plants are high-yielding and fast-growing - plants with bigger cobs and shorter maturation periods.
With global warming, it is essential the plants make the most of any rains while they last - "a crop for every drop", to quote the motto of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra).
But the most popular hybrid varieties are those that remain "poundable". That is, the grains can still be beaten into flour in the traditional way.
"Are you telling me you have you never pounded maize, James?" smiles Cathy, a Kenyan journalist, with a cheeky wink.
"You know in Kenya, a woman is not considered fit enough to be a bride until she can pound a bag of maize. And a boy is not a man until he can build a house."
Where does that leave me? Still out of breath from lifting the maize sack.
And it is not only maize. There are hybrids for every local crop - cassava, sweet potato, soya, ground nuts and legumes.
But the most remarkable thing about these "miracle seeds" is that many are not new at all.
"They have been with us for decades, but they never made it to the fields," says Agra's Fred Muhhuku, an expert on agronomics in East Africa.
"Traditionally, farmers have either been too poor or too afraid to take a chance on these new varieties, even though they can triple their yields," he explained.
"If they plant their hardy traditional strains, they know that come drought or flood, some crop will survive to harvest. The harvest will be tiny - maybe 800kg per hectare - but it is guaranteed, so they take no chances."
The result was six successive years of food shortage in Malawi - beginning in 2000.
"And there was no lack of rains, I can tell you," says Dr Jeffrey Luhanga, technical co-ordinator at the Ministry for Agriculture.
"I experienced the famine in 2005; there were lines of people queuing for food aid.
"The thing you have to remember is that these were the ones who were still strong enough to walk to the depots. The hungriest - the ones who really needed the food - they were stuck at home, starving.
"Now look around Malawi, you see only healthy faces. Yes, this is a green revolution. And it is being driven by science."
He reels off a list of programmes - irrigation, agronomy, planting patterns, science-based economic practices.
"These technologies have been in our research institutes for years, but they went nowhere. Now, for the first time, the technology is in the farmers' hands."
Seeds of hope?
It begins with the seeds. The hybrid maize varieties are high yielding - around 2,500kg/hectare or more.
"I grew 80 bags this year, in the land just around my house. Eighty bags!" says Mitengo Gamr, one of Admarc's regional managers.
"My family no longer queues to buy food."
But they come with a catch - they are addicted to costly nitrogen fertiliser.
"But it is worth the investment," explains Muhhuku, "because the extra maize you grow, you can sell to pay for the fertiliser, buy an animal for your farm and diversify. You can build security."
And what if the rains fail? "Then you have enough left over from your big harvest last year," he smiles.
"It's true, it's a different way of farming and it takes some convincing."
The other drawback is what is known as post-harvest management. The hybrids yield more flour, but the grains are less resistant to worms and weevils.
"In some places, you lose 40% of your storage," says Muhhuku.
The answer, inevitably, is pesticides, another expensive input. The margins are still favourable, but what if you can't afford to invest in the first place?
This is where the Malawian government has stepped in. A month or two from now, 1.5m of the poorest subsistence farmers will begin arriving at Admarc's depots, clutching four coupons: one for seeds, two for fertilisers and another for legumes. This year, for the first time, pesticides will be subsidised too.
It's an enormous cost burden for a developing economy to bear - which is why the past, African governments have preferred to rely on private investment and foreign aid.
Malawi has gambled - and last year, the reward was millions of dollars of maize export revenues.
"I am just back from New York, from a UN conference, where they had an entire session dedicated to Malawi," beams Dr Luhanga.
"Other African countries - they want to know if they can follow our example. Kenya, Tanzania, Swaziland - they are thinking of introducing subsidies. This green revolution - it is truly for the whole of Africa."
Where is the catch? Certainly, the revolution has not stopped the market price of maize from doubling in a year - from 30 kwachas (£0.12) per kilogram to 60 kwachas.
The government, controversially, has passed a law capping the price at 52 kwachas - an emergency measure.
But utter the words "technological dependency" to Muhhuku, and he simply shakes his head.
"We hear this accusation from western development workers. We are told 'why make farmers buy seeds every year? Why let the companies trap you?' But this is based on a misunderstanding. Storing the hybrid seeds - it takes a lot of technical knowledge.
"The farmers can stick to their traditional ways. But the yields are not worth their sweat."
Tomorrow, I will meet the farmers and ask them myself.
TUESDAY 07 OCTOBER - RISING FROM THE ASHES
The women of Mnduka village are pounding their drums.
Under the shade of a mango tree, a crowd is gathering around a masked man, who is twisting, thrashing, throwing himself at the dust, over and over again.
He appears possessed - demonic, even. But everyone is cheering him. This isn't an exorcism, it's a celebration.
"Gule Wamkulu" - literally the "Big Dance" - traditionally marks the end of a successful harvest.
The masked figure is either a spirit, an animal, or a ghost - everyone I ask spins me a different spooky yarn. But what they all agree on, is that he has risen from the graveyard, "and he is very, very happy".
Happy as everyone here in Mnduka village has been at harvest time, since agro-technology arrived.
If you're looking for a model village, to test whether Malawi's much trumpeted "green revolution" is science fact or romantic fiction, Mnduka is well worth the trek.
Having had my fill of analysing national maize export statistics, I came here to ask the farmers themselves.
Thanks to the government subsidy coupons for fertiliser and seeds, the technology is now in their hands.
Despite the bail out, a national newspaper today carries a front page story warning of impending food shortages in six regions, affecting 1.5m Malawians - about one tenth of the population.
Three years ago, Mnduka too was a dustbowl. The drought of 2005 was as harsh here as anywhere in Malawi.
Among the farmers, a quick show of hands reveals the vast majority were already growing hybrid maize but without access to affordable fertiliser, their family stockpiles ran out in three months.
"Every day, we had to look for work just to eat that night, says Esther Chirwa, 28, who supports a household of five.
"We were living from hand to mouth."
"I travelled far and wide just to find food," says Nixon, 58, who harvested only 10 bags, which had to feed a family of six for a year.
"When you are away for so long, your family suffers."
Today, as we are led between the maize fields, the place has the feel of an African fairytale.
Down by the murky brown stream, the local farmers take turns to sweat it out on the irrigation pedal foot pump - mercifully shaded by bushes.
The field alongside - once scrubland - is now blossoming into a small oasis of peppers and maize - "the garden" they call it.
The idea is simple - one village garden will train a hundred farmers how to irrigate.
The foot pump and simple water piping were funded by an NGO, but across Malawi, it is the government which has taken the lead irrigation, with an ambitious program to create a "green belt" stretching along the shores of Lake Malawi.
"Remember - with irrigation, you can harvest three maize crops a year," says Phyness Thembulembu from US-based NGO Citizens Network for Foreign Affair (CNFA).
Meanwhile, over on the hillside, the farmers are teaching each other how to plant cassava - a drought resistant alternative to maize.
"The crop is common in other areas of the country, but back in 2005, very few here were growing it," says Phyness. "After the drought, they had to think again".
But the centrepiece of the village model is the agrodealer. A local shopkeeper has been given grants and technical training to advise farmers on fertilisers and hybrid seeds.
The shop is one of several thousand in a national a program funded by AGRA, and implemented here in Mnduka by CNFA.
"In the past, the farmers had to travel 18km to access the high yielding varieties (CNFA has a target of 5km) - an expensive and time consuming trip, when you are struggling to support a household of six or seven," says Matthews Matale, an agrodealer from a neighbouring town.
Now the seeds are on their doorstep. With support from CNFA, the agrodealer holds annual crop demonstrations and the farmers choose the seed variety they favour.
"The most popular in my shop," says Dinah Kapizan, "are the maize seeds that come in animal varieties - monkeys, elephants and lions.
"Monkeys are the quickest to maturity, the elephants next, and then the longest, but with the greatest yields, are the lions."
A clever marketing ploy, but it's simpler than remembering the difference between MH18 and DK8A31. I for one, am grateful.
Esther, too is grateful for the seeds, the shorter travelling distance to the agrodealer, and most importantly, the subsidies.
"It's clear we are having bigger harvests now, with the fertiliser. I am able to sell some. The only thing I fear for is what happens if they take the subsidy away."
The dependency cannot be underestimated. The biggest round of applause under the mango tree was not for the wild ghost-man dancing, but for the local headman - when he called for fertiliser to be stocked here in the village, like the seeds.
"My worry though, is can this really be sustainable in the long term?", says France Gondwe, of Malawi's International Centre for Agroforestry research.
"The Nitrogen fertiliser is a quick fix - but without it, the harvest is low, because the soils are suffering from years of [monoculture]. Even with the fertiliser, they are not performing to their full potential.
"There are alternatives to fertiliser - crop rotation, manure, agroforestry. But with the food shortages, the government is trapped. And so the people are trapped too."
Back under the mango tree, the mysterious masked man takes a bow and races off through the crowd, and over the hill in the direction of the graveyard.
Mnduka too has risen from the graveyard - but the dancing goes on, for now at least.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7651977.stm
Published: 2008/10/08 16:01:51 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Seeking Africa's green revolution
From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - a minor agricultural miracle.
By applying a mixture of crop breeding, soil management, irrigation and diversification, agro-science experts are helping subsistence farmers to cope with climate change and buck the trend in neighbouring African countries.
BBC science and environment reporter James Morgan has gone into the field to meet the families who are sowing the seeds of a uniquely African green revolution - one which is as kind to the environment as it is to the economy.
SUNDAY 05 OCTOBER - SIZING UP MALAWI'S MIRACLE
"If [environmentalists] lived for just one month among the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals."
So said Norman Borlaug, one of the founding fathers of the original Green Revolution - credited with wiping out starvation in Asia.
But can technology really be the saviour of Africa's struggling farmers? It has become a terribly unfashionable opinion in the UK, where "green" campaigners are no longer content to denounce GM crop trials. They simply rip them up.
"Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy," said Borlaug. "Starvation is."
I have decided to take Norm up on his wager, by coming to Malawi to see for myself.
Because no matter how many UN reports I've ploughed through, grasping the root cause of the current "food crisis" in Africa is anything but straightforward.
And neither is my journey to Malawi - a sweaty overnight haul which takes me via Kenya, Zambia, and several re-runs of Indiana Jones films. But for heroic inspiration, I look instead to a speech by Kofi Annan, the new chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra) - a $200m, pan-African programme, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations.
"Let us generate a uniquely African Green revolution," says Annan, cutting a heroic pose on my crumpled transcript. "There is nothing more important than this."
It is difficult to argue. Over the last 50 years, African farmers have laboured in the heat, while countries like Mexico, India and the Philippines have undergone a green revolution - applying novel fertilisers and pesticides to churn out bumper harvests of new high-yield varieties of wheat and rice.
Empowering farmers
Meanwhile, Africa has been cultivating greater and greater poverty statistics.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where per capita food production has steadily declined.
The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing
Malcolm Fleming
One third of Africans are malnourished. Soils are among the most depleted on Earth. Farmers do not have access to productive seed varieties and those that do have neither the knowledge nor the tools to reap the harvest. Slash and burn still reigns.
Climate change is forecasting ever more variable rainfalls, and more frequent droughts. Add in soaring fuel prices and the scourge of HIV/Aids, and the average African finds himself surrounded in the kind of perilous predicament which from which even Harrison Ford would struggle to escape.
But it is this very challenge that has drawn the world's crop scientists and agro-economists to Malawi. They hope to pioneer novel farming systems that propel Africa towards a new era of food security.
It has already been dubbed by members of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as "a greener revolution".
"Greener" because it works with ecosystems, not against them. A revolution that is "pro-poor and pro-environment", in the words of Mr Annan.
The talk around the conference tables is of "empowering" subsistence farmers to find their own, local solutions - farming techniques which are sustainable, affordable and tailored to local soils, markets and eating preferences.
Over the next week, I'll be taking a look at these projects first hand - catching fish in the desert, planting strange trees in the middle of maize crops.
I'm wondering how women and men, who have been sowing the same maize seeds for generations, really feel about the new hybrid varieties of seeds which are more nutritious, but also more hungry for expensive pesticide and fertiliser.
'Against the grain'
Most of all, I'm curious to find out whether the "miracle" we have read about here in Malawi is bona fide or illusory. Is the revolution underway, or a simple matter of better rainfall?
The facts are these. During the last decade, Malawi suffered six successive years of food shortage, culminating in 2005. One third of the population - 4.5million people - went hungry.
Step forward two years, and Malawi is exporting more than one million metric tonnes of maize, its staple crop.
The government, against the advice of the IMF and the World Bank, has handed out vouchers to 1.5m of the country's poorest farmers, enabling them to buy "inputs" - seeds, fertiliser and pesticides. Meanwhile, yields have mushroomed. Malawians are selling maize to Kenya and giving food aid to Zimbabwe.
The success was hailed last year with Oxfam's Malcolm Fleming describing to the BBC how Malawi was going against the grain of African agriculture.
So when I bump into Malcolm, a well-kent face in my native Scotland, on the flight to Lilongwe, I don't hesitate to offer a warm handshake of congratulations.
"I'm afraid that things have moved on since then," he sighs. "The harvests have been great, but still the food prices in Malawi are still rocketing."
Why? "That's the question," he continues. "The closer I look, the more complicated it becomes. But from what I gather, the maize is being sold abroad at greater prices, and that keeps the prices up in Malawi."
Malcolm is here doing research in the lead up to World Food Day on 16 October. Helping him to raise awareness is another familiar Scottish face, but I'm afraid I am sworn to secrecy. All will be revealed in due course.
"Rising food prices might not be much of a problem for me or you," says Mr Fleming, "but if you spend 80% of your household income on food, and then the price doubles..."
It is a welcome serving of realism pie to chew on as I step out of Lilongwe airport.
The pavements are covered in a blanket of purple blossom - it looks like a fairytale. And the boys cartwheeling down the red dirt roads seem full of beans. But the lumps in their bellies tell a different story.
MONDAY 06 OCTOBER - MAIZE EVERYWHERE
Piled 19 bags high; when I say bags, I'm talking about the kind of sacks you can dam rivers with.
I tried lifting one. At 50kg, that was a big mistake. I left that to the army of youngsters with Popeye biceps, who were loading Malawi's mammoth maize harvest onto lorries, bound for government sales depots around the country.
"If you came here just a few years ago, you would find this storage depot totally empty," says Feckson Kantonga, operations manager for the government-sponsored Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation (Admarc).
Feckson is standing at the foot of a pile of maize as tall a house. He has put his best suit on to welcome a Kenyan film crew, who had come from Nairobi to find out the secret of Malawi's success.
How exactly can it be, they are wondering, that their prosperous nation has come to depend on little old Malawi (the 13th poorest nation in the world) to supply its staple food crop?
"Malawi?" asks Peter, a business journalist. "We Kenyans know nothing of Malawi. I had to look the place up on Google to find out what the heck was going on here."
The answer is hidden inside the sacks. They are fat-packed with new hybrid corn varieties - strains that were unheard of in Malawi a decade ago.
Bred by multinationals in Malawi, or crop centres in Zimbabwe and Sudan, the plants are high-yielding and fast-growing - plants with bigger cobs and shorter maturation periods.
With global warming, it is essential the plants make the most of any rains while they last - "a crop for every drop", to quote the motto of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (Agra).
But the most popular hybrid varieties are those that remain "poundable". That is, the grains can still be beaten into flour in the traditional way.
"Are you telling me you have you never pounded maize, James?" smiles Cathy, a Kenyan journalist, with a cheeky wink.
"You know in Kenya, a woman is not considered fit enough to be a bride until she can pound a bag of maize. And a boy is not a man until he can build a house."
Where does that leave me? Still out of breath from lifting the maize sack.
And it is not only maize. There are hybrids for every local crop - cassava, sweet potato, soya, ground nuts and legumes.
But the most remarkable thing about these "miracle seeds" is that many are not new at all.
"They have been with us for decades, but they never made it to the fields," says Agra's Fred Muhhuku, an expert on agronomics in East Africa.
"Traditionally, farmers have either been too poor or too afraid to take a chance on these new varieties, even though they can triple their yields," he explained.
"If they plant their hardy traditional strains, they know that come drought or flood, some crop will survive to harvest. The harvest will be tiny - maybe 800kg per hectare - but it is guaranteed, so they take no chances."
The result was six successive years of food shortage in Malawi - beginning in 2000.
"And there was no lack of rains, I can tell you," says Dr Jeffrey Luhanga, technical co-ordinator at the Ministry for Agriculture.
"I experienced the famine in 2005; there were lines of people queuing for food aid.
"The thing you have to remember is that these were the ones who were still strong enough to walk to the depots. The hungriest - the ones who really needed the food - they were stuck at home, starving.
"Now look around Malawi, you see only healthy faces. Yes, this is a green revolution. And it is being driven by science."
He reels off a list of programmes - irrigation, agronomy, planting patterns, science-based economic practices.
"These technologies have been in our research institutes for years, but they went nowhere. Now, for the first time, the technology is in the farmers' hands."
Seeds of hope?
It begins with the seeds. The hybrid maize varieties are high yielding - around 2,500kg/hectare or more.
"I grew 80 bags this year, in the land just around my house. Eighty bags!" says Mitengo Gamr, one of Admarc's regional managers.
"My family no longer queues to buy food."
But they come with a catch - they are addicted to costly nitrogen fertiliser.
"But it is worth the investment," explains Muhhuku, "because the extra maize you grow, you can sell to pay for the fertiliser, buy an animal for your farm and diversify. You can build security."
And what if the rains fail? "Then you have enough left over from your big harvest last year," he smiles.
"It's true, it's a different way of farming and it takes some convincing."
The other drawback is what is known as post-harvest management. The hybrids yield more flour, but the grains are less resistant to worms and weevils.
"In some places, you lose 40% of your storage," says Muhhuku.
The answer, inevitably, is pesticides, another expensive input. The margins are still favourable, but what if you can't afford to invest in the first place?
This is where the Malawian government has stepped in. A month or two from now, 1.5m of the poorest subsistence farmers will begin arriving at Admarc's depots, clutching four coupons: one for seeds, two for fertilisers and another for legumes. This year, for the first time, pesticides will be subsidised too.
It's an enormous cost burden for a developing economy to bear - which is why the past, African governments have preferred to rely on private investment and foreign aid.
Malawi has gambled - and last year, the reward was millions of dollars of maize export revenues.
"I am just back from New York, from a UN conference, where they had an entire session dedicated to Malawi," beams Dr Luhanga.
"Other African countries - they want to know if they can follow our example. Kenya, Tanzania, Swaziland - they are thinking of introducing subsidies. This green revolution - it is truly for the whole of Africa."
Where is the catch? Certainly, the revolution has not stopped the market price of maize from doubling in a year - from 30 kwachas (£0.12) per kilogram to 60 kwachas.
The government, controversially, has passed a law capping the price at 52 kwachas - an emergency measure.
But utter the words "technological dependency" to Muhhuku, and he simply shakes his head.
"We hear this accusation from western development workers. We are told 'why make farmers buy seeds every year? Why let the companies trap you?' But this is based on a misunderstanding. Storing the hybrid seeds - it takes a lot of technical knowledge.
"The farmers can stick to their traditional ways. But the yields are not worth their sweat."
Tomorrow, I will meet the farmers and ask them myself.
TUESDAY 07 OCTOBER - RISING FROM THE ASHES
The women of Mnduka village are pounding their drums.
Under the shade of a mango tree, a crowd is gathering around a masked man, who is twisting, thrashing, throwing himself at the dust, over and over again.
He appears possessed - demonic, even. But everyone is cheering him. This isn't an exorcism, it's a celebration.
"Gule Wamkulu" - literally the "Big Dance" - traditionally marks the end of a successful harvest.
The masked figure is either a spirit, an animal, or a ghost - everyone I ask spins me a different spooky yarn. But what they all agree on, is that he has risen from the graveyard, "and he is very, very happy".
Happy as everyone here in Mnduka village has been at harvest time, since agro-technology arrived.
If you're looking for a model village, to test whether Malawi's much trumpeted "green revolution" is science fact or romantic fiction, Mnduka is well worth the trek.
Having had my fill of analysing national maize export statistics, I came here to ask the farmers themselves.
Thanks to the government subsidy coupons for fertiliser and seeds, the technology is now in their hands.
Despite the bail out, a national newspaper today carries a front page story warning of impending food shortages in six regions, affecting 1.5m Malawians - about one tenth of the population.
Three years ago, Mnduka too was a dustbowl. The drought of 2005 was as harsh here as anywhere in Malawi.
Among the farmers, a quick show of hands reveals the vast majority were already growing hybrid maize but without access to affordable fertiliser, their family stockpiles ran out in three months.
"Every day, we had to look for work just to eat that night, says Esther Chirwa, 28, who supports a household of five.
"We were living from hand to mouth."
"I travelled far and wide just to find food," says Nixon, 58, who harvested only 10 bags, which had to feed a family of six for a year.
"When you are away for so long, your family suffers."
Today, as we are led between the maize fields, the place has the feel of an African fairytale.
Down by the murky brown stream, the local farmers take turns to sweat it out on the irrigation pedal foot pump - mercifully shaded by bushes.
The field alongside - once scrubland - is now blossoming into a small oasis of peppers and maize - "the garden" they call it.
The idea is simple - one village garden will train a hundred farmers how to irrigate.
The foot pump and simple water piping were funded by an NGO, but across Malawi, it is the government which has taken the lead irrigation, with an ambitious program to create a "green belt" stretching along the shores of Lake Malawi.
"Remember - with irrigation, you can harvest three maize crops a year," says Phyness Thembulembu from US-based NGO Citizens Network for Foreign Affair (CNFA).
Meanwhile, over on the hillside, the farmers are teaching each other how to plant cassava - a drought resistant alternative to maize.
"The crop is common in other areas of the country, but back in 2005, very few here were growing it," says Phyness. "After the drought, they had to think again".
But the centrepiece of the village model is the agrodealer. A local shopkeeper has been given grants and technical training to advise farmers on fertilisers and hybrid seeds.
The shop is one of several thousand in a national a program funded by AGRA, and implemented here in Mnduka by CNFA.
"In the past, the farmers had to travel 18km to access the high yielding varieties (CNFA has a target of 5km) - an expensive and time consuming trip, when you are struggling to support a household of six or seven," says Matthews Matale, an agrodealer from a neighbouring town.
Now the seeds are on their doorstep. With support from CNFA, the agrodealer holds annual crop demonstrations and the farmers choose the seed variety they favour.
"The most popular in my shop," says Dinah Kapizan, "are the maize seeds that come in animal varieties - monkeys, elephants and lions.
"Monkeys are the quickest to maturity, the elephants next, and then the longest, but with the greatest yields, are the lions."
A clever marketing ploy, but it's simpler than remembering the difference between MH18 and DK8A31. I for one, am grateful.
Esther, too is grateful for the seeds, the shorter travelling distance to the agrodealer, and most importantly, the subsidies.
"It's clear we are having bigger harvests now, with the fertiliser. I am able to sell some. The only thing I fear for is what happens if they take the subsidy away."
The dependency cannot be underestimated. The biggest round of applause under the mango tree was not for the wild ghost-man dancing, but for the local headman - when he called for fertiliser to be stocked here in the village, like the seeds.
"My worry though, is can this really be sustainable in the long term?", says France Gondwe, of Malawi's International Centre for Agroforestry research.
"The Nitrogen fertiliser is a quick fix - but without it, the harvest is low, because the soils are suffering from years of [monoculture]. Even with the fertiliser, they are not performing to their full potential.
"There are alternatives to fertiliser - crop rotation, manure, agroforestry. But with the food shortages, the government is trapped. And so the people are trapped too."
Back under the mango tree, the mysterious masked man takes a bow and races off through the crowd, and over the hill in the direction of the graveyard.
Mnduka too has risen from the graveyard - but the dancing goes on, for now at least.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7651977.stm
Published: 2008/10/08 16:01:51 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Monday, October 20, 2008
Mutharika Talks Tough
"Mutharika Talks Tough" was a recent headline talking about the president of Malawi, His Excellency Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika. When asked about when parliament was going to be opened as it had been closed by Bingu and not reopened despite an agreement reached between the government and the opposition that had set the date of reopening to the day before the article Bingu replied that "he would only call for Parliament if the opposition guaranteed that they would behave responsibly." He then went on to say that opposition MPs are "wasting taxpayers money on parliamentary sittings, which do not yield anything."
Then on a complete different tack the President went on about witchcraft without any prompting from the interviewer. In a unique defense of the right to an education for children, he "took a swipe at people who teach children witchcraft, saying children should be allowed to go to school and then afterwards make their own individual choices if they want to join witchcraft or not."
The persistent belief in witchcraft is quite interesting. Our day staff has been having to take his wife to the doctor repeatedly and so far they have not been able to determine why she is ill. Our day staff member has told me that since the doctor is unable to come up with a clear cause for her illness then it is obvious that her illness is the result of a spell put on her. When I asked what happens next he told me that it is in God's hands now. Thankfully, she has now recovered from this mystery illness.
We are going to Cape Town, South Africa between Oct. 12 and 20, 2008 and we are really looking forward to the trip. Will give an update when we are back.
Source: The Daily Times, September 30, 2008.
Then on a complete different tack the President went on about witchcraft without any prompting from the interviewer. In a unique defense of the right to an education for children, he "took a swipe at people who teach children witchcraft, saying children should be allowed to go to school and then afterwards make their own individual choices if they want to join witchcraft or not."
The persistent belief in witchcraft is quite interesting. Our day staff has been having to take his wife to the doctor repeatedly and so far they have not been able to determine why she is ill. Our day staff member has told me that since the doctor is unable to come up with a clear cause for her illness then it is obvious that her illness is the result of a spell put on her. When I asked what happens next he told me that it is in God's hands now. Thankfully, she has now recovered from this mystery illness.
We are going to Cape Town, South Africa between Oct. 12 and 20, 2008 and we are really looking forward to the trip. Will give an update when we are back.
Source: The Daily Times, September 30, 2008.
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