Malawi, battling to cope with food shortages, has been asked to return at least US $8 million in development aid because it allegedly mismanaged the money.

Southern Africa's famine is especially devastating for women in Malawi, where widows have no property rights and AIDS leaves grandmothers to care for hungry orphans.

Malawi's congested 23 prisons, home to about 8 000 convicts but with a capacity of 4 500, are "hell on earth", a high court judge said in a newspaper interview published last Saturday.

Faced with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, deepening malnutrition as a result of a serious food shortage and abject poverty, Malawi has managed to become a model for sub-Saharan Africa in treating tuberculosis (TB), a disease that kills two million people annually.

An age-old battle rages between the environment and the economy, with the environment often losing out to economic development. But projects in Lake Malawi National Park and Mlambe Natural Resource Management show that environmental preservation can also be economically profitable.

The Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) has back-pedalled on its recently issued threat that the Malawi Institute of Journalism radio station (MIJ FM) risked losing its broadcasting licence for what MACRA described as anomalies and bias in its reporting.

President Bakili Muluzi of Malawi publicly accepted defeat after a bid to run for a controversial third term was rejected by the country's parliament last Thursday.

Ratcheting up the debate over how and why Malawi sold its emergency food supply, the chief of the IMF has told British parliamentarians that the fault lay with the World Bank and the European Union.

Girls in Malawi have to overcome a mountain of sometimes insurmountable obstacles if they hope to complete their education, a new study has found. The girls' battle to get an education falls within the shocking statistic that only 20 percent of Malawi's children complete primary school.

Coordinator of a women rights group, Seodi White, is a busy lawyer. When she is not giving free legal advice to women, she is busy conducting human rights education programmes for them. White is one of the few female lawyers in Malawi.

CU has designed a multi-strategy Emergency & Rehabilitation Plan (ERP) that encompasses relief food distribution, supplementary feeding to malnourished children, winter cropping, basic food security related rehabilitation & recovery activities, etc. Therefore, this new & challenging Programme Co-ordinator position has been created to further develop & implement the ERP.

As this nation of 10 million people faces its most serious food crisis in recent memory, government officials are encouraging farmers to plant trees as part of a long-term effort to improve soil fertility and increase food supplies.

The Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) has warned the Malawi Institute of Journalism radio station (MIJ FM) that it risks losing its broadcasting license because of what MACRA describes as anomalies and bias in its reporting. MIJ FM is a community radio station run by the MIJ to train students. However, it has been established that the license principles issued to MIJ state that the radio station should protect the best interests of the community, encourage new and innovative programmes and promote community access to information. MACRA Director of Telecommunications Mike Kuntiya refused to clarify what the authority meant by "anomalies" in MIJ FM programmes. MACRA, hitherto dormant, is yet to prove to be a neutral referee. The Authority has failed to take action against the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), despite the public outcry over MBC's apparent partisan reporting in favour of the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF).

On 20 June 2002, police in Malawi's largest city Blantyre stopped a series of public debates organised by the Lilongwe Press Club to discuss the proposed amendment to the Malawi Constitution regarding the limits on the president's term in office.

Many Malawians living with HIV/AIDS are forced to rely on illegal drugs in a bid to treat opportunistic illnesses, ease suffering and prolong their lives.

The US government announced that it will make a $14 million aid donation to enable hunger-stricken Malawi to import the staple food, maize. The Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID) said the funds would be used to buy 40 000 metric tones of maize.

A new opposition political party was launched Sunday in Malawi, and its founders - a group of businessmen, intellectuals, and civil rights activists - said it aimed to squash corruption in this southern African country. The new party, Malawi Forum for Unity and Development, was formed to combat what party spokesman Levsion Ganzia described as government corruption, food insecurity, and political intimidation.

An ActionAid Policy Brief

News of the famine in Malawi (like elsewhere in the world) developed as rural whispers slowly, too slowly finding their way to the ears of urban policymakers in Lilongwe and foreign capitals from October 2001. The Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN) and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace had attempted unsuccessfully to mobilize activist groups to pressurize the Government to declare a “famine”. The data provided then by these organizations and others was dismissed as lacking credibility.

0n February 22nd 2002, MEJN released a press statement calling for Government and donor action and stating “The Government should acknowledge that there is hunger in Malawi; make the holding of maize a crime, subsidize the price of maize in Malawi; government and civil society should provide food supplies to vulnerable groups”. At this point, the mainstream international media started broadcasting reports of a famine emergency, desperation and critical food shortages.

By June 2002, the disaster had claimed up to a thousand African lives. Yet, in Washington DC, media coverage and policy treatment of the disaster has been confusing. Media coverage of the discourse between the Government of Malawi, bi-lateral donors or the International Monetary headlined alternately corruption abounded or criminal macroeconomic policy. Situated within this discourse and resourced by the public release of a comprehensive report by ActionAidMalawi this policy brief isolates one important factor for examination and public scrutiny namely, the failure of macro-economic and structural policy to safeguard against the famine in Malawi.

We remain conscious of the myriad of complex variables, both causal and correlative, often associated with famine situations. As with all famines, the causes fall into two categories: ‘trigger factors’ (livelihood shocks and response failures), and ‘underlying causes’ (factors that create vulnerability to livelihood shocks). As elaborated in the ActionAidMalawi report (June 2002), the disaster can be explained as the product of a combination of both ‘technical’ issues and political challenges. Issues of poor early warning systems, market failures, structural poverty and inadequate infrastructure are also parts of this crisis.

However unlike previous famines in Malawi, this one was preceded by over a decade of structural and agriculturally related policy reforms by successive Malawian Governments advised by the International Monetary Fund. While not ignoring the many domestic factors contained in the ActionAidMalawi report, this report singles out key international policy components for attention.

MAJOR FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The ActionAid Malawi report clarifies the broad array of causes for the famine.1998/99 and 1999/00 were two good production years. However, localised floods reduced the 2000/01 maize harvest and left a shortfall estimated at 237,000 metric tones in 2000-2001. In 2001-2002 the shortfall had almost tripled rising to 600,000 metric tones. Initial crop estimates suggested that the maize deficit would be partly offset by a 30% increase in roots and tubers production (especially cassava) over the previous year. This figure was wrong and generated misplaced complacency. Donors failed to react to signals of an impending food crisis, the Strategic Grain Reserve was sold, and senior members of government denied the existence of a famine until February 2002, when civil society and the media presented irrefutable evidence of hunger-related deaths.

The decision to sell the Strategic Grain Reserve (SGR) followed advice from the IMF to reduce the level of buffer stocks held from 165,000 MT to 60,000 MT. Instead, almost all of the reserve was sold, much of it on local markets, against IMF advice to export it in order to minimise disincentives to maize producers.

There is some evidence that much of the SGR was sold to local traders, who stockpiled it and profiteered from hunger. When the government attempted to cover the resulting food gap through imports, this proved extremely expensive, and a series of logistical problems caused fatal delays and an escalation of maize prices to unaffordable levels. Concern about various governance issues – including suspicions of corrupt practice around the SGR sale – caused donors to vacillate for several months before responding to signals of distress with food assistance.

Following stakeholder consultations across the Malawian Government, civil society and donor communities on a draft version of the report, ActionAid further calls on the International Monetary Fund to act quickly to institute the following measures;

1. A temporary moratorium on further structural reforms to formulate, set and meet the food security objectives of a national development strategy in conjunction with the Malawian Government, civil society and donors.

2. Review and propose legal and operational measures that support the Malawian Government to regulate various forms of manipulation, rent-seeking and un-competitive activities by sector agents.

3. Institute a tracking study that traces which sectors and interests have benefited from the dissolution of the Strategic Grain reserve and the reduction of institutional and structural regulatory and supervisory capacity. This is in line with the commitment to undertake Poverty and Social Impact Assessments.

Two Malawian academics have produced a comprehensive report that looks at the role of NGOs in the education sector in Malawi. The report, titled 'The changing roles of non-governmental organisations in education in Malawi', is aimed at highlighting the role NGOs are currently playing in strengthening education and to assist donors and host governments in the design, use and management of NGO-implemented programmes.

Malawian President Bakili Muluzi has warned donor countries that he will not let foreign governments take advantage of the country's poverty to dictate how he runs Malawi, the Pan-African News Agency reported.