A definition of vulnerability was provided in Chapter 1 of this thesis, and the problem of
growing vulnerability in low income eastern and southern African countries was discussed in
Chapter 2. In addition some brief comments were made in Chapter 1 concerning the chief
causes of vulnerability in Malawi. In this section, the thesis briefly extends this understanding
of vulnerability in Malawi. First it reaffirms a context of persistent poverty and widening
vulnerability through the 1990s and 2000s. Second it provides data on the poverty status of
households, as emerged from the 2004-05 IHS2. Third it summarises the chief causes of
vulnerability that have been identified by other researchers. Fourth, it comments on the
relative participation of different proportions of the farm population as net buyers or sellers of
maize.
First, there is a broad consensus that from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s vulnerability to
hunger in Malawi became more prevalent and more deeply entrenched than in former decades
(Devereux 1998, 1999, Devereux et al. 2006a). This trend is implicit at one level in the lack
of progress in poverty reduction in that period. Rural poverty was found to be 65 per cent in a
UN survey conducted in 1993 (Government of Malawi/United Nations 1993), 67 per cent in
the first Integrated Household Survey (IHS1) conducted in 1997/98 (Government of Malawi
1998a), and 60 per cent in the second Integrated Household Survey (IHS2)(Government of
Malawi 2005e). Given the margins of error in these statistics, little if any progress in rural
poverty reduction occurred over this 15-year period, with significant spillovers into the
progression of vulnerability.
The reasons widely put forward for this process are explored shortly (see the discussion about
the chief causes of vulnerability); however additional trends are also relevant. As shown in
earlier tables on maize production, maize output in the 1990s and early 2000s was uneven on
a declining trend, culminating in the lowest output since 1993/94 occurring in 2004/05. At the
same time, efforts to diversify Malawian food crop agriculture away from maize yielded slow
and marginal results (Mataya et al. 1998). Crops such as cassava, potatoes, rice, sorghum and
millet which can be direct substitutes for maize in consumption are ‘location-specific’ crops.
For example, rice and cassava do well in lakeshore and river areas, but rice in particular is not
an option in most rainfed agriculture in Malawi. Likewise sorghum and millet do relatively
well in the lower Shire valley, but cannot compete with maize in yields or returns in much of
the rest of the Malawi. There is some truth, perhaps, in the broader observation about sub-
Saharan Africa made by Hardy (1998) that maize often dominates farming systems in Africa
because it is the crop most suited to agro-ecological conditions and it provides the broadest
range of benefits in storage and consumption for poor people.
Alongside a disappointing agricultural trend, there are continuous pressures from rising
population and diminishing farm size. The 2008 census revealed an overall rate of population
growth of 31.5 per cent from the preceding census in 1998, and population in rural areas rose
by 30.3 per cent over the intercensal interval, from 8.8 million to 11.5 million people
(Government of Malawi 2008b). With no new land becoming available, this increased rural
population has had to be accommodated within the existing area available for cultivation, with
inevitable effects on farm size and the incidence of functional landlessness. At the same time,
the opportunities for non-farm wage work in rural areas remained quite limited throughout
that period, and it is observed that demand for ganyu tended to outstrip supply, lowering the
real rural wage (Whiteside 2000, Devereux et al. 2008, p.34).
Second, it is useful here to reprise briefly some key figures from the IHS2 household budget
survey undertaken by the NSO in 2004/05, details of which are provided in Chapter 4, even
though these figures are now five years old, and partial surveys (as discussed in Chapter 1)
show a marked improvement in poverty indices in the intervening period. In 2004/05 roughly
17 per cent of all households in Malawi (448 thousand households) were estimated to be
ultra-poor.
32According to the IHS2 definition of ultra-poverty, these are households unable to
meet even minimum annual calorie needs on the basis of their per capita expenditure level. Of
this national figure, 428 thousand households (15.9 per cent of all the households) are rural
and ultra-poor; in other words ultra-poverty is overwhelmingly rural in character.
Furthermore, 174 thousand households are not just rural and ultra-poor but are labour
constrained in the sense of having a dependency ratio of 3 or over or have chronic illness
32
This is less than the ultra-poverty rate of 22.3 per cent that has already been cited as the figure for Malawi, and which refers to individuals, not households. Since poorer households are larger than better off households in Malawi, the proportion of households that are ultra poor is lower than the proportion of people who are ultra poor.
amongst adults in the household. These and related figures are summarised in Table 3.4
below. While the ultra-poverty line should not be treated as too definitive (people move in
and out of ultra-poverty depending especially on their maize harvests), these data are
indicative of the scale of the vulnerability problem faced by Malawi in the recent past.
Table 3.4: Distribution of Households by Poverty Category 2004-05
Poverty Category
National
Rural
Number
%
Number
%
Non poor
1,518,620
56.4
1,249,296
53.2
Poor but not ultra-poor
726,718
27.0
672,228
28.6
Ultra-poor, of which:
448,206
16.6
428,337
18.2
Not labour constrained
266,392
9.9
253,995
10.8
Labour constrained
181,814
6.8
174,342
7.4
Total Households
2,693,544
100.0
2,349,861
100.0
Source: drawing on Ellis and Marchetta (2009)
Vulnerability to hunger in Malawi is associated with long term and short term factors, as well
as cumulative effects on household resilience (Devereux 1999, Devereux et al. 2006a). The
principal causes of vulnerability in Malawi identified in the literature are as follows:
(a) a substantial proportion of small farm households (estimated at around 60 per cent) are
net food buyers, always requiring recourse to the market to cover their ‘food gap’ even
in good years;
(b) a long run decline in available cultivated land per farm family (Jayne et al. 2003),
accelerated in Malawi during the 1970s and 1980s by the land alienation policies of
the Banda period;
(c) unstable maize production outcomes from one year to the next, caused principally by
varying weather conditions, but also associated in the past with low yielding
traditional varieties, depleted soil fertility and varying access to fertilizer;
(d) an associated high degree of maize price instability, both within years (seasonal price
instability) and across years in terms of the degree of such instability;
(e) slow progress in the diversification of the rural economy, both in terms of reducing
small farmer’s reliance on maize as the principal food crop, and in terms of the lack of
non-farm activities in rural areas;
(f) the adverse impacts at household level of the rise in HIV infection in the 1980s and
1990s, and the associated chronic illnesses and mortality of AIDS in the late-1990s
and 2000s (these impacts include asset erosion to pay for medical care and funeral
costs, and depletion of available labour for productive activities) (Conroy et al. 2006);
(g) decline in personal security in rural areas, especially evidenced by livestock theft,
causing a fall in the use of livestock (especially goats and cattle) by small farmers as
an asset buffer against future shocks (Ellis et al. 2003, Pelser et al. 2007).
(h) the cumulative impact of all these risk and shock factors taken together, principally
manifested by incomplete recovery from successive shocks reducing long term
resilience and increasing the likelihood that households are unable to cope with
adverse effects using their own resources.
Examining points (a) to (d) further, small farm size, coupled with inequality in land access in
customary areas and inability to access agricultural technologies and input, means that
participation in maize markets is highly differentiated. According to Jayne et al. (2003), about
half of marketed output in Malawi is supplied by just 2-3 per cent farmers, operating in the
farm size range of 4-20 hectares. The remaining half of marketed supply originates from a
second tier of roughly 20 per cent of households, selling in the range of 0.1 to 5 tons maize
per household. As stated in point (a) above, a third category comprises buyers only of staple
grains, corresponding to around 60 per cent of all rural households. A final category of
farmers (15-20 per cent) carry out both selling and buying of maize, or are self-sufficient in
food overall due to combining maize production with other starchy crops like cassava or
sweet potatoes. The size of the third of these categories, the 60 per cent of farm households
who are net buyers of staple grains, is a key factor in explaining vulnerability to hunger in
Malawi. Such households are prone to widening ‘food entitlement’ gaps in years of poor
harvests, as well as to the adverse purchasing power effects of seasonal maize price increases.
The next chapters, especially chapter 5, examine these aspects in more detail including
analysis of maize price trends, and the proportion of people identified as at risk of missing
food entitlements, at a time when government has declared phenomenal maize surpluses.
3.5Summary
The intention of this chapter was to provide essential features of Malawi’s past policies,
politics, administration, and maize economy that inform the later concerns of the thesis. The
chapter begins with a synthesis of the agricultural policy history of Malawi, with a special
focus on past input subsidy policies. It then explores the history of cash transfers in Malawi,
mainly in the form of food- or cash-for-work schemes associated with public works
programmes. The chapter summarises views found in the literature about the way politics
works in Malawi, and sketches out the current structure of devolved public administration.
Finally, the chapter extends previous points made about vulnerability in Malawi, addressing
‘who are the rural vulnerable’ via an examination of the proportion of ultra-poor and ultra-
poor labour constrained rural households, and the proportion of all farmers that are net buyers
of maize.
Chapter 4: Empirical Methods and Fieldwork in Malawi
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