Hiya loyal blog followers! I hope this blog finds you all in
good health and enjoying the start to your summer. The weather is cooling off
here (much to my delight) and I’ve even started breaking out my scomba (jacket)
or a flannel at night. Watching the stars as they crawl through the night on
their way to you all now requires a cup of tea. Well, “requires” is a relative
term. More often than not it requires the thought
of tea. I typically don’t start a fire just for tea.
Basi. (Literally “enough” but used like “that’s plenty.”) On
to where my thoughts have been these past few days.
As some of you may have heard, the southern region of Malawi
experienced extremely devastating floods in January. At least several hundred
thousand people were affected. The number may be higher – I don’t have
reliable/steady access to news here, so I’m not sure where the figure stands.
Natural disasters happen. It’s nothing new. But what is so different about one
happening here versus the US or even a less developed country like the
Philippines is the lack of infrastructure and ability to respond to a crisis of this magnitude.
Malawi is dependent on agriculture for the vast majority of
its GDP. Not to mention the fact that most households are subsistence farmers
or only sell a small portion of what they harvest. There are cash crops such as
Soya, peanuts, or tobacco, but the money from selling these is either not very
high (Soya and peanuts) or it is exposed to dramatic price fluctuations on the
auction floors and requires expensive inputs to have a good harvest (tobacco).
In the case of tobacco, farmers will often spend about $50 USD on one bag of
fertilizer for only a portion of their tobacco crop. Meaning they might spend
upwards of $400-500 USD on a bet that they will earn back this money and maybe
an additional $50 USD . So even the country’s most profitable cash crop doesn’t
even generate that much cash. I should mention that most farmers get coupons at
the beginning of planting season which allows them to buy subsidized fertilizer
for maybe $20 USD. This does not mean that they end up in a better position,
because it only allows many people to put more fertilizer in their tobacco
fields to the detriment of their maize fields (which then get shorted on
fertilizer application). But I’m getting off topic.
With the floods this year, entire villages were washed away.
And not like we think of a flood in the States – water surrounding houses,
people leaning out of second story windows, placing banners on the roof, or
cars driving through watery streets. The houses here are made from mud brick,
so even a heavy rain will begin to wash away the walls and may even cause the
foundation to fail (this happened to one of our volunteers). Even my house was
damaged this year, and my area had very poor and sporadic rainfall. So you can
imagine what floods mean: houses turn into massive mud piles, the thatch roofs
simply disintegrate, and the roads become impassible ribbons of mud. The
water/bathing buckets are washed away, and the few luxury items you have (be it
a few chairs, a mattress, or a radio) are destroyed. But when this happens,
there is nowhere for people to turn. They have no money to travel to unaffected
areas, and community structures (schools, churches, etc.) are also made of mud.
So they offer no refuge.
As if this is not enough of a disaster for a country trying
to pick itself up (with a hefty amount of pulling on behalf of the EU, US,
Norway, Japan, and countless NGOs), most families don’t have bank accounts.
Their form of saving is to buy/keep livestock. And what happens in a severe
flood? The livestock drown. They are washed away. They escape and are never
seen again. One adult cow can be sold for about $400 US, so losing one is going
to hurt a family. Now try losing 4. 5. 10. Paying school fees, buying
fertilizer, buying food, and paying for funerals now becomes nearly impossible.
But it gets worse. Many farmers either take out a loan to
pay for fertilizer (without which their harvest will be abysmal since the soil
has been poorly treated for decades). And when the floods came, they washed
away all the fertilizer and the newly sprouted/just planted crops. Since using
local varieties of maize has been stigmatized (“Ah. The local maize? It is for
the poor. It is weak. The hybrid? It is very strong.”), families could not
afford to buy more hybrid seed. And the supply of local seed is too low to be
of any real value. With the loss of the entirety of their crops, farmers face
immense debt (and banks will commonly charge 30-70% interest) and have no
prospect of harvesting any food for their own family. But with no money (it’s
already been spent on the seeds/fertilizer that have been washed away, and
their livestock have been drowned) they won’t even be able to afford food at
the market.
And this is just in one region of the country. Though the
central and northern region did not receive heavy rains, they experienced
scarce and insufficient rains. Kasungu district (where I trained last year and
the agricultural heart of Malawi) suffered immensely. Some maize never grew
above waist level so there were no ears to harvest. The same is true in
Chitipa. Nationally, maize harvest is expected to see a 40% DECREASE from last
year. Not good in a nation where maize is the main ingredient in nearly every
meal. Even in the bwanas’ fields (bwana = boss or wealthy person) the harvest
is only 1/3 of the usual. And they can afford the extra money for adequate
fertilizer and pest control.
So what does this mean for the coming year? The answer can
be summed up in one word: Hunger. Talk to any Malawian about the year and they
will surely mention the “hunger season.” This is a time where families begin to
run out of food from the previous year’s harvest. As this year’s crops are
still maturing, they are not yet providing food. This is typically from
Dec-Feb, and many families cannot afford to buy food at the market. They may go
house to house, asking for food or simply not eat for days at a time. But this
year is different. With such a bad harvest, the hunger season has never ended.
And things are only going to get worse in the coming months.
The last time it was this bad was 2002 and if you ask when
the last time was that someone knew of a person who died of starvation, they
will invariably say 2002. There is already talk of Government buying maize from
other countries (in addition to trying to set price controls on various
commodities). During that time it wasn’t just a lack of food that caused
problems. Nearly every village in Malawi depends on ground water for all their
water needs (drinking, bathing, washing) and in low rainfall years boreholes
can dry up. Many even dry up during average rainfall years. So couple drought
with low food production and you have a serious crisis on your hands. As we do
here. It got so bad in 2002 that Peace Corps had to pull volunteers from their
sites to stay in Lilongwe (the capital) because the conditions at their site
were too stressful. Imagine having to walk at maybe 6+ miles to get 20L of
water, and witnessing your friends and community members starve and struggle to
feed their families. All while knowing that you have enough food for yourself
but not for others.
I’m hopeful that the floods have garnered enough
international attention and aid that this coming year there will be more
efforts to provide access to food. At the end of the day, it is not a question
of money or food production. It is a question of access to adequate nutritious
foods, and I think Malawi may be better equipped to ensure access than we were
13 years ago. In the meantime, if I needed any more drive to continue my work
here, I’ve certainly found it. I’m planning to increase my efforts to educate
people on various food preservation methods, nutrition, promote better farming
practices, and teach people how to create a household budget so that they can
afford food year round. Simple solutions, but ones that often fall through the
cracks as far as international development is concerned.
On the whole, I am hopeful that this year will be much more
successful work-wise than last year. Yes, it will be extremely tough, but I
believe having a current crisis to point to when I hold meetings to promote new
techniques and ideas will decrease the resistance to change. Certainly this is
going to be a tough year and could be depressing, but I refuse to look at it
that way. It is a wonderful opportunity to bring about some lasting change in
my community. And don’t worry – though yields are down in my area, we harvested
enough to see us through the year. Food prices at the market will be higher,
but we’ll get by without too much struggling. Looking forward to the coming
months, I see challenges, not obstacles. Opportunity, not disaster. Things are
looking up.
Until next time,
Dylan
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