The Malawi fertiliser subsidy programme: politics and pragmatism

Food insecurity in Malawi has become endemic, with around 70-80% of rural households short of self-produced staple foods for four to five months of the year. This Future Agricultures brief reviews the Malawian government's Fertiliser Subsidy Programme (FSP), introduced in 2005/2006 as a means of attempting to tackle the ever-pressing food crisis. <br /><br />The paper explores the origins of the FSP, examining the debt dimension of the scheme (i.e. in relation to the obstacles it posed for qualifying for debt relief through the implementation of the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy), the political dimension of the programme and the design issues it posed. Conflicting donor attitudes are then reviewed, followed by the impact of the 2005/06 FSP, which was found to be fairly successful, despite a number of serious problems, with Malawi enjoying its biggest ever maize harvest in 2006. <br /><br />The brief finds that a combination of maize, tobacco, electoral, legislative and aid-politics has in different ways influenced, affected and shaped the form and content of the FSP. Key lessons highlighted by the author include the following: the domestic political-economic context and unique circumstances of each country have to be taken into account in policy formulation. Supposedly &ldquo;second-best&rdquo; options, which nevertheless work in a particular context, are preferable to dogmatic, one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions there is a need to grasp fully the array of stakeholders and their competing interests, views and demands in the policy process. Understanding these interests is critical for analysing potential trade-offs. Assuming that policies emerge from technical reasoning and &ldquo;first principles&rdquo; economic theory will result in policy failure strong domestic leadership and a democratic mandate mean that donors need to adopt a more pragmatic, reflexive attitude in their approach to development policy in agriculture <br />