By: Jan Duchoslav and Joachim De Weerdt
On 23 March 2024, His Excellency the President declared a state of disaster in 23 of Malawi’s 28 districts in anticipation of a poor harvest caused by the ongoing El Niño climatic event.
El Niño has brought about spells of dry weather across much of southern Africa, leading to poor agronomic conditions in the current growing season and likely below-average harvests. In our November 2023 policy brief, we noted that 7 of the past 11 El Niño events had negative effects on agriculture in Malawi, causing, on average, a 22.5% decline in maize production. The numbers mentioned by the president in his address suggest that the government is expecting losses of similar magnitude.
While the amount of food crops that Malawian farmers will harvest cannot yet be exactly determined, it will clearly not be sufficient to meet the country’s food needs for the remainder of the year. The question is not whether there will be shortage of food, but how large the gap will be, and at what point after the 2024 harvest food will start running out and for whom.
In our policy brief, we refer to two recent El Niño events to illustrate the danger ahead. In an average year, not affected by El Niño, about 9% of Malawi’s population needs assistance during the lean season. That figure shot up to close to 40% following the 2005 and 2016 El Niño-affected harvests.
The poor harvest that is expected this year will come at a time when households’ resilience to shocks has already been severely eroded over two years of compounding shocks. 4.4 million people in Malawi (22% of the population) and a further 18 million elsewhere in the region are currently experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity. Underproduction at such a precarious time threatens to make the next lean season in 2024/25 exceptionally dire. More people than usual will require assistance for longer than usual. While the president’s estimate that 600,000 tons of maize will be required for lean season assistance may be on the higher side (such amount of maize would feed 9 million people for 6 months), the requirement will certainly be larger than in recent years.
Three broad sets of strategies can help soften the blow:
- Irrigated winter crop production
- Food imports
- Food or cash distribution during the coming lean season
Irrigated winter production will be important – and should be invested in. However, there are limits to what investment in irrigation can achieve in the short time before the onset of the lean season. New irrigation schemes take years rather than months to build, and even refurbishing existing ones that have fallen into disrepair may be hard to achieve before winter. Existing irrigation schemes will almost certainly be unable to produce enough food to close the gap.
Imports will therefore also be needed, and arranging for them will be very time-sensitive. Maize prices in Malawi and elsewhere in the region typically decrease during harvest and start increasing again soon after harvest is completed. In the past, they typically bottomed out around the beginning of June, which would be the best time to import the commodity. The longer imports are delayed, the costlier they will become. The sustained decline that global maize prices experienced over the past 18 months is unlikely to make future imports cheaper. Global trade is dominated by yellow maize, whereas Malawi consumes white maize, which is mostly traded regionally.
El Niño is negatively affecting agricultural production throughout much of southern Africa, including Zambia and Mozambique – the usual sources of Malawi’s maize imports. It is unlikely that Tanzania and Kenya, which can expect a bumper harvest thanks to El Niño, will be able to make up for the entire shortfall of production in southern Africa. Imports will gradually become harder to secure, and if Malawi takes too long in making the necessary arrangements, there may be precious little food left to buy in the region, regardless of available funding. Imports from further away where El Niño may have improved growing conditions (Argentina, United States, Ukraine) will require even longer lead times.
It is therefore important to plan for imports now, even though the extent of need is not yet fully known. It is all but certain that at least some imports will be necessary, and the country cannot afford to wait with arranging for them until precise figures on agricultural production and household vulnerability become available. Funding of food imports should, however, remain flexible so that it can be redirected towards food or cash transfers in support of food insecure population once the extent of domestic shortage becomes clear and once imports close the gap.
Cash transfers can be used to help vulnerable households buy food, but only if food is available in local markets (which in turn depends on imports). Without sufficient food in the market, cash transfers will only push prices up, as consumers compete to purchase a scarce good.
If food imports are organized centrally and land in NFRA storage facilities, it will be quicker and might even be more cost-effective for DoDMA to distribute them as in-kind support, rather than have them sold by ADMARC. Under the latter option, the most destitute people will need a cash transfer before they are able to buy food from ADMARC, adding another logistical layer to the operation.
Here again, timely, flexible planning will be important, regardless of the chosen transfer modality. Chances are that humanitarian funding will trickle in gradually, that the final amount of available resources will only become known after the onset of the lean season, and that the amount will be lower than needed. Plans should therefore be drawn up now for which aid recipients will be prioritized at different levels of funding, and how they will be identified and reached. Waiting until all unknowns become known would be a recipe for a chaotic and ineffective response.
