Hedging Food Security through Winter Cultivation: The Agronomy

15 Pages·2008·0.19 MB·English

Blessings Chinsinga1
Hedging Food Security through Winter Cultivation: The Agronomy of Dimba
Cultivation in Malawi2
SETTING THE CONTEXT
Until the introduction of the fertiliser subsidy programme in the 2005/2006 growing
season, food insecurity was for close to two consecutive decades a characteristic feature
of a great bulk of Malawians both in urban and rural areas. The depth and magnitude of
the food security crisis was such that even in climatically favourable cropping seasons, up
to 70-80% of smallholder farmers hardly produced enough to last them for as little as
four months after harvest (Owusu and N’gambi, 2002; Cammack, et al., 2003; Dorward
and Kydd, 2004). While the origins of the endemic food security crisis are intensely
debated, most existing accounts link the food security crisis to the cumulative impact of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank sponsored interventions to
liberalise the agricultural sector which stretches back as far as the early 1980s (Stambuli,
2002; Oxfam, 2002; Lambrechts and Barry, 2003). The underlying argument is that the
policy reforms administered to the agricultural sector under the aegis of liberalisation
have backfired chiefly because poverty and social impact assessments were not
undertaken prior to their implementation. Instead of therefore stimulating accelerated
agricultural productivity, growth and profitability, the reforms have on the contrary
exacerbated poverty, deepened food insecurity and perhaps more critically left the
agricultural sector tittering at the brink of total collapse.
The 2002 food crisis however proved to be a turning point in the country’s fledging
ability to feed itself. Up to 70% of the farming families representing 3.2 million of the
population were without food and starving. This devastating food crisis occurred despite
concerted efforts to keep the deteriorating food security situation in constant check. The
most notable policy innovation in this regard was the introduction of a US$ 23.5 million
1
Department of Political and Administrative Studies, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, Malawi
Email: [email protected]
2 A Paper to be read at the Education Development Conference 2007 hosted by the National University of
Ireland Galway 24-25 November 2007.
Starter Pack (SP) programme providing enough seed and fertiliser along with extension
advice for all smallholder farmers to cultivate 0.1 hectares of the maize and vegetables.
This initiative was implemented in 1998/99 and 1999/00 growing seasons before being
phased into the Targeted Input Programme (TIP) in the 2000/01 growing season as a
gradual exit strategy since most donors led by the World bank felt the universal SP
targeting of all smallholder farmers would be an enormous fiscal burden for the
government and therefore unsustainable (Harrigan, 2001 and Levy and Barahona, 2002).
The 2002 hunger crisis led to the swift introduction of Winter TIP as a strategy for
cushioning the adverse impact of the pervasive food insecurity which dramatically
worsened especially toward the onset of the planting period between November and
December.
The more critical outcome of the far reaching repercussions of the 2002 food crisis on the
very fabric of rural livelihoods was perhaps the urgent need to spell out a coherent food
security policy framework. This food security policy would have to outline conditions for
a stable, accessible and healthy food supply to all people at all times and to set up
necessary disaster preparedness measures in case of emergencies endangering food
security. But with the lack of appreciation of the vital role of research based evidence in
the policy formulation processes, the efforts to develop a viable food security policy
framework have been quite challenging (Clay and Bohn, 2002). This is, inter alia, aptly
illustrated in the evaluation study for the 2003 Winter TIP. It clearly demonstrates that
the Winter TIP intervention to a very great extent was ill conceived since no meaningful
attempts were made to come to grips with the dynamics of the agronomy of dimba
cultivation in rural Malawi. The main argument of this paper is that such oversights are
unavoidable consequences of ad hoc policy interventions which tend to lead to wrong
prescriptions to rightly diagnosed problems (Young and Court, 2002).
FOOD SECURITY IN PERSPECTIVE
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Until the turn of the 1990s, public discussions and debates about food insecurity were
almost non-existent in the policy circles. This was among other things attributed to the
fact that “talk of food shortages was more or less a taboo, and ……at times it was looked
at as subversion and lack of patriotism” (Chilowa, 1998: 553). This was the case because
for the most part of the 1980s, the critical food policy challenge was to prevent the maize
price from collapsing under an avalanche of hybrid maize to the extent that some scholars
argued that Malawi was at the verge of experiencing its own brand of Green Revolution
(Chilowa, 1998; Orr, et al., 2001; Harrigan, 2001). Given this steady maize production, it
is argued that both the government and donor agencies were convinced that food
insecurity was not at all an issue of immediate concern in Malawi.
But all this was to dramatically change in the 1990s and beyond. The total collapse of the
agricultural support institutional structure in terms of credit, transport, extension and
marketing infrastructure coupled with regular adverse climatic patterns and an unfriendly
economic policy environment notably massive currency devaluations triggered a series of
bouts of hunger eventually culminating in the 2002 hunger crisis. This crisis is primarily
attributed to the progressive decline in the production, and consequent steep rises in
maize prices, which is the staple dish. For instance, maize production in 2002 stood at
1.54 million metric tones representing a 10% drop from 1.6 million tones in 2001. During
the same period, the maize price increased by as much as 400% while in an average year
prices varied by approximately 150% but were at the peak when the poorest could least
afford them (Stambuli, 2002 and Lambrechts and Barry, 2003). The 2002 food crisis
affected almost over one third of the population estimated at 3.2 million. The food deficit
during this crisis was as high as 71% of the required cereals which translated to about
630,000 metric tones but fell to 570,000 metric tones if other foods rather than maize
(rice, sorghum, millet, sweet potatoes and cassava) were included in the consumption
basket.
The precarious state of food security prevailed in a context of acute and widespread
poverty. According to the 1998 Integrated Household Survey (IHS) consumption data,
65.3% of the country’s 10 million population or roughly 6.3 million people are poor.
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Their consumption of basics needs is below the minimum level estimated at US$ 13 cents
per day in 1998, and it is believed that 2.8 million people live in dire poverty. Life
expectancy at birth dropped from 43 years in 1996 to 39 years in 2000. Infant and under
five mortality rates were estimated to be 104 and 189 deaths per 1000 live births
respectively (Chinsinga, 2002 and Cammack, et al., 2003). The magnitude of the crisis
forced poor households to reduce their food portions, skip meals, eat wild foods, and sell
livestock, tools and household implements in order to buy maize in the local markets.
They even pulled children out of school to help gather food, and left their farms to look
for ganyu or casual work (Lambrechts and Barry, 2003). This poverty situation has not
changed much at all.
The 2005 IHS shows that 52% of Malawians eke their livelihoods below the poverty line.
The proportion of the ultra poor has essentially remained the same at 22%. Put differently
the 2005 IHS suggests that about 6.7 million Malawians live in poverty and as many as
2.7 million cannot afford to meet even the daily recommended food requirements The
gini-coefficient (an equality index) is estimated at 0.38, which generally reflects profound
inequities in access to assets, services and opportunities across the population. The
conclusion of the comparative analysis of the 1998 IHS and 2005 IHS is that there has
been little or no progress at reducing poverty and inequality. The apparent decline in the
incidence of poverty from 65.3% in 1998 to 52% in 2005 is attributed to the differences
in the methods used in the two surveys. The verdict of the Human Development Index
(HDI) is not any different either. Malawi has dropped from position 138 out of 178
nations in 1990 to 166 out of 178 nations in 2006. This affirms the steady decline in
health, education and general living standards. In fact, Malawi is one of the poorest
countries in the world whether judged by GNP per capita, the UNDP’s Human
Development Index or its Human Poverty Index (cf. Jenkins and Tsoka, 2003).
DIMBA CULTIVATION: A QUICK OVERVIEW
Very little is known about the dynamics of dimba cultivation in Malawi. Dimba or dambo
cultivation is used synonymously to designate pieces of land used for winter cultivation
primarily on the basis of residual moisture often in areas bordering streams and rivers
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(Peters, 1996 and Kambewa, 2005). Translated as wetland in English, dambo is thus an
agricultural asset that provides farmers with the opportunity to cultivate additional crops,
either to supplement their meagre harvests from the main season or for sale. A wide range
of crops is cultivated in dimbas. These include maize, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans,
rice, pumpkins, cowpeas, green leafy vegetables, onions, watermelons etc. These crops
primarily thrive on residual moisture but in the event of critical moisture stress “people
dig wells and use watering cans, pails and even plates to irrigate” (Kambewa, 2005: 2).
Dimba cultivation reportedly became a very important activity in the wake of the
recurrent spells of droughts since the turn of the 1990s. The magnitude of dambo land in
Malawi is estimated to be between in the region of 480,000 and 600,000 hectares (FAO,
1996). Dimba cultivation takes as much as 123,000 hectares of land compared to only
27,000 hectares which are under formal irrigation. The major drawback however is that
dimbas do not feature at all in the existing irrigation literature on Malawi even though
“they constitute a major portion of the irrigated land among smallholder farmers in
Malawi” (Mulwafu, 2005: 156). It does not feature at all in the new water and irrigation
policies and yet its significance in rural economies is beyond dispute. The launch of the
Winter TIP in the 2001/02 growing season was surely prompted by the desire to hedge
food insecurity through dimba cultivation. This programme was justified as an
opportunity to increase the supply of maize in the country at critical junctures. The
reasoning behind this strategy was that increasing the supply into the maize market
towards the onset of the lean periods would help keep prices of maize at levels most rural
inhabitants could afford.
EMPIRICAL SETTING
Design of the Evaluation Study
The Winter TIP evaluation study was conducted in 14 districts across the country. The
choice of districts was done in such a manner that ensured at least a reasonable
geographical spread in terms of the diversity of agro-ecological conditions in Malawi.
The sampling frame used for selecting the villages visited included all those villages with
between 40 and 250 households. The rationale for defining the sampling frame in this
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way was to ensure that enough Winter TIP recipients were to be found so as to conduct a
series of exercises as stipulated in the terms of reference of the evaluation and that the
research process would be manageable within the specified time limits (Levy and
Barahona, 2002 and Chinsinga, 2004).
The main research instrument for the study was the census strategy in which all
households in the selected villages had specific attributes of particular interest
enumerated. This involved recording several household attributes on specially designed
cards. These attributes included the gender status of the households; whether the
household had access to dambo or irrigated land; whether the household was cultivating
dambo or irrigated land; the food security status of the households; and whether the
households had received Winter TIP. For the purposes of this study, three food security
categories were distinguished: food secure (FS-those households having enough to eat
throughout the year from harvest to harvest): food insecure (FI-those households that
have enough to last from harvest up to Christmas but not between Christmas and the next
harvest, the harvest in Malawi being in April/May); and extremely food insecure (EFI-
those households that have a longer period of not having enough to eat, which start facing
food shortages before Christmas).
The food security status of households was used as a proxy measure for poverty in rural
Malawi. The rationale for using food security as a proxy measure of poverty was that
poverty related data are not readily available and, if they exist at all, tend to be too crude
to be useful. The census strategy was further complemented with a traditional focus
group discussion whose principal aim was to understand how the 2003 Winter TIP
logistics were actually organised and executed in each village. The data from the cards
were entered into a specially designed Microsoft Access programme and later exported to
SPSS Version 11 for analysis. The data was appropriate for statistical analysis since they
constituted a full census of each community visited. As such, the data could be
aggregated to show the results from the sample of 14 villages in 14 districts.
The Agronomy of Dimba Cultivation in Malawi
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The study provided an in depth understanding of the nature of dambo as an agricultural
asset; the determinants of dambo access and control; and households’ status, dambo
access and dambo use in rural Malawi.
Nature of Dambo as an Agricultural Asset
The results of the study somewhat clarified the notion of dimba cultivation especially in
terms of how dambo as an agricultural asset could be viewed. Two types of dambo were
distinguished: 1) where dambo land is flooded and often waterlogged; and 3) where
dambo cultivation depends on residual moisture in areas bordering streams and rivers.
Building on the dichotomy as spelt above, dambos are thus a highly precarious
agricultural asset because the ideal conditions for cultivation are often subject to wide
variations. A related issue pertains to the reported variability in the fertility levels of
dambo lands. Not all dambo is fertile and the levels of dambo fertility vary from place to
place. Dambos falling in the first category as specified above were generally felt to be
more fertile than those falling in the second category. In the first category, the dambo
soils tend to be moist and loose while in the second they tend to be dry, sandy and
extremely compact. The dambos in the first category are considered to be very fertile
because they are flooded and benefit from the alluvial deposits. Farmers do not use
manure or fertiliser on these dambos arguing that the use of fertiliser risks degrading their
soils.
These findings raise two vital concerns pertaining to the design of the 2003 Winter TIP
package. First, it did not make sense to dispense a universal Winter TIP package across
the country given the variability or precariousness of dimba as an agricultural asset. The
maize seed was surely inappropriate for areas where the dambo was heavily flooded. Rice
was an ideal alternative. It is therefore not surprising most households either sold out the
maize seed or simply kept it for upland cultivation. Second, the top dressing fertilizer that
was included in the 2003 Winter TIP package faced a similar fate. The use of manure let
alone fertiliser is deemed unnecessary for the first category of dambos since they are
regarded as inherently fertile. Similarly the fertiliser was either sold out or simply kept
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for use in the main growing season. Overall therefore, the universal Winter TIP package
therefore was not allocated efficiently. These resources could have thus been productively
used in other numerous alternative ways impacting positively on livelihoods of the rural
masses.
Households’ Status, Dambo Access and Dambo Use
In this section we examine the status of households that have dambo access and use it for
winter cultivation on the basis of the evidence collected through the 2003 Winter TIP
evaluation study. First, we examine whether or not the poverty status of a household
affects its ability to access and cultivate dambo. Second, we consider whether or not
gender plays any decisive role in the access to, and subsequent dambo use and third
obstacles that hinder households to engage effectively in dimba cultivation.
It was possible to profile the poverty of the households in the villages visited since all
households in each village were classified into three predetermined food security
categories and the food security status of the households was used as a proxy measure for
poverty. Using the census strategy, several attributes of the households were collected and
recorded on specially designed household cards including dambo access and use. The
results of the analyses on the key issues raised above are presented in Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4
below.
Table 1: Access to Dambo by Food Security Status
Access to Dambo Food Secure Food InsecureExtremely Food Insecure
All households
___________ ____________ ____________________ ____________
N % N % N % N %
No 31 25.0 36 16.7 207 36.0 274 29.9
Yes 93 75.0 180 83.3 368 64.0 641 70.1
Total 124 100.0216 100.0575 100.0 915 100.0
Source: Adapted from Chinsinga et al., (2003)
Table 2: Dambo Use by Food Security Status
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Dambo Use Food Secure Food InsecureExtremely Food Insecure All
households
___________ ____________ ____________________ ____________
N % N % N % N %
No 51 41.1 76 35.2 330 57.4 457 49.9
Yes 73 58.9 140 64.8 245 42.6 458 50.1
Total 124 100.0216 100.0575 100.0 915 100.0
Source: Adapted from Chinsinga et al., (2003)
Table 1 shows that up to 70% of the households had access to dambo. It further shows
that access to dambo does not very much depend on the poverty status of the households
as dambo access turned out to be more or less the same across the food security
categories. The EFI households are however slightly disadvantaged compared with FS
and FI households but the difference is not that significant. There is nonetheless a
stronger relationship between poverty and dambo use. This is reflected by the fact that
only 43% of EFI households used dambo during the 2003 winter cropping season
compared with 58% of the FS households and 64% of the FI households.
Financial and labour constraints are the main obstacles to dimba cultivation which
explains why fewer poor households use dambo even though their access to it is similar
to that of wealthier households. This is the case because dimba cultivation requires at
least a significant cash investment for it to be profitable. For this reason, dimba
cultivation was consistently likened to a hawker or grocery, which needs some financial
investments to be viable. Financial resources are deemed necessary in order to facilitate
the procurement of better quality inputs particularly seed and fertiliser as well as hiring
labour for dimba cultivation is generally agreed to be tough work. Consequently
prolonged illness, particularly HIV/AIDS related diseases, forces households to
eventually give up dimba cultivation. The fact is that illness creates divided attention
between dimba cultivation and taking care of the sick. If it is the head of the household,
or an economically active adult who is ill, the impact is even much more substantial
because it also affects the availability of labour at the disposal of a household.
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Table 3: Access to Dambo by Gender of Household Head
Access to Dambo Male Female All
households
___________ ___________ _______________
N % N % N %
No 185 28.7 89 32.8 274 29.6
Yes 459 71.3 182 67.2 641 70.1
Total 644 100.0 271 100.0 915 100.0
Source: Adapted from Chinsinga et al., (2003)
Table 4: Dambo Use by Gender of Household Head
Access to Use Male Female All
households
___________ ___________ ________________
N % N % N %
No 308 47.8 149 55.0 457 49.9
Yes 336 52.2 122 45.0 458 50.1
Total 644 100.0 271 100.0 915 100.0
Source: Adapted from Chinsinga et al., (2003)
When disaggregated according to gender status of the households, the results do not show
any significant disparities between male and female-headed households in so far as
access to dambo is concerned. The fate of widowed and divorced women in patrilineal
societies needs a special caveat however. It was established that they are effectively
discriminated against in terms of dambo access. Since land inheritance is through the
male lineage, divorced or widowed women who return to their original villages often find
that they have no access to dambo land. Thus, unless the brothers are willing to share, the
returning divorcees and widows find themselves in a situation of no access to dambo.
There is however a slightly higher proportion of male headed households using dambo
(52%) compared to female-headed households (45%). This disparity could be attributed
to the labour intensity of dimba cultivation as well as to the fact that male-headed
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