Malawi’s Starter Pack: A Smarter Subsidy to Empower the Poor with Science-Based Agriculture

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa aims to develop and extend new technologies to benefit Africa’s poor farmers and make African agriculture more productive. In some cases, the World Bank indicates that it would support what it calls “smart subsidies” to assist bringing such productivity to poor farmers. In the 1980s Malawi demonstrated that with subsidies on hybrid seed and fertilizer and with reasonably good rainfall, it could produce more than enough maize for its own commercial demand, exporting the “surplus” to others in the region. Following a serious food crisis in 2005, Malawi has again demonstrated that relatively massive input subsidies and good rainfall can generate maize surpluses. However, the subsidies are too large to be sustained, and they do not meet a reasonable definition of “smart.” The real potential green revolution — truly increasing productivity for all farmers by changing input/output ratios and cropping systems — has yet to gain donor support. The Malawai government’s “Starter Pack program” demonstrated its potential but after two years was abandoned by donors in favor of a less costly nonrevolutionary safety net program only for the least able. Predictably, that failed to produce enough maize, and the current fertilizer subsidy approach was adopted — US $74 million annually compared to the Starter Pack’s $25 million. Analysis would show that the current brute-force use of fertilizer is far less cost-effective and less sustainable than a truly revolutionary approach that changes input/output ratios and not just raises inputs. In comparison to the current subsidy, the Starter Pack approach meets much more closely the World Bank’s definition of a “smart subsidy.” The current “surplus” is not a green revolution; it is simply a return to the subsidized surpluses of the early 1980s that coexisted with widespread malnutrition. As the Starter Pack program demonstrated, a “smarter subsidy” could produce better results at far lower cost and with the prospect of long-term improvement of agricultural productivity.