Malawi Women pound the remains of their maize crop into flour to make the local maize porridge in Dedza district.
A l'émission AVEC L'OPINION Charles-Henri Baker soutenait que son approche était réaliste et faisable. On ne peut résoudre la question haïtienne sans un projet national: production nationale et défense nationale.
Production nationale: Agriculture, commerce et industrie + Défense Nationale: PNH (Police nationale d'Haïti) et FAD'H (Forces Armées d’Haïti) = Prospérité.
Il nous avait promis un article du journal Herald Tribune (que nous publions au bas du texte et sur www.reseaucitadelle.blogspot.com) faisant état d'une réalisation similaire en Afrique dans un pays connu sous le nom de MALAWI.
Grâce à une mobilisation nationale, le gouvernement de ce petit pays pauvre, qui connaissait la famine, a résolu le problème. Il suffisait de donner des intrants aux petits cultivateurs pour que Malawi devienne aujourd'hui un pays exportateur de produits agricoles.
Charlito soutient qu'il avait raison en 2006, son plan est réaliste et réalisable. Il conseille au pouvoir en place de suivre ses conseils en vue d'alléger la souffrance de la population.
Cyrus Sibert,
reseaucitadelle@yahoo.fr
Cap-Haïtien, Haïti
28 janvier 2008.
Ending famine, simply by ignoring the experts
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/01/africa/02malawi.php
Published: December 1, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi:
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to
In
Farmers explain
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the
"As long as I'm president, I don't want to be going to other capitals begging for food," Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, "Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have."
The country's successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in
In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed
In a withering evaluation of the World Bank's record on African agriculture, the bank's own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa's declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.
"The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted," said Jeffrey Sachs, a
Here in
"The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop," said Stephen Carr, who has lived in
"The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted," he said. Some economists have questioned whether
The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and
Farmers interviewed recently in
In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a cart.
Last year, roughly half the country's farming families received coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer, enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to plant less than half an acre.
Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country's entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and corruption.
Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children begging for food at his door.
"I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and every one," he said. "It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed."
But Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his jurisdiction since 2005.
"It's quite marvelous!" he exclaimed.
The Department for International Development in
"It was really a good economic investment," he said.
The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort.
But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to
"The plain fact is that
And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters private markets.
Here in
"The issue is, let's do a better job of it," said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.
Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent,
Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the village's 53 families.
"Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the orphans?" asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.
Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.
There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming year as their neighbors' fertilized corn fields turned deep green.
Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila, rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women howled with laughter. The tension fled.
He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.
"I don't want anyone to complain," he said. "It's not me who chose. It's you."
The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then dispersed to their homes and fields.
