Malawi president calls for greater cooperation in Africa to improve food security

Liz Ford in the Guardian (UK): The president of Malawi has pledged to work with other African heads of state to devise a sustainable programme on food security and establish an advisory body to improve agriculture across the continent.

Speaking ahead of the World Economic Forum on Africa, which begins in Tanzania tomorrow, Bingu wa Mutharika said he planned to work with other African leaders to devise a programme on food security that was sustainable "regardless of who is looking at it", and set up what he called an African compact on food security to act as an independent advisory body to the African Union (AU) on agriculture and food issues.

...In his interview with Sibanda, Mutharika, who is also chairman of the AU, said smallholder farmers needed greater support to rise about subsistence level farming and said greater cooperation among African countries could overcome the problems of food security and poverty. …He added: "In many African countries we are being fed by very small, small farmers.... An then the question was how do we get these farmers to produce beyond subsistence and what are the challenges?"

He believes a package of "inputs" - improved seed varieties, fertilizers, access to extension services and markets – was required. "Indeed we did that five years ago and found the response to be absolutely tremendous. We were able to get people who previously could only produce three or four bags of maize or about 50kg a year, for instance, are now able to produce 15, 20, 25 [bags]. These people can go beyond subsistence, can feed themselves and also feed the nation."

The challenge now, he said, was to see if what had been learned in Malawi could be scaled up across the continent. This, said Mutharika, would involved better regional cooperation among African countries….

A tea plantation in Malawi, shot by Steve Evans, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.