A big policy group in Malawi is telling the current administration to kill its major farm subsidy program for good. The Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives, through its director Sylvester Namiwa, said the long-running Farm Input Subsidy Programme is a proven failure. They want the government to stop wasting money on it and instead build actual fertilizer plants locally.
Namiwa called the logic of spending billions on fertilizer only to spend more billions on relief food for the same people months later completely backwards. He pointed to a recent fertilizer donation from Morocco as a sign of a missed opportunity for local production. The group's fix involves letting commercial farmers grow crops for the state grain marketer to sell cheaply later.
Their complaints did not stop at agriculture. CDEDI also ripped into the government over the ongoing foreign exchange mess, demanding real action to stop money leaving the country and to boost local manufacturing. They called out the endless fuel crisis too, tying it directly to corruption at the national oil company and sharing what they called evidence with anti-graft bodies. The organization finished with a call to rework mining deals and to finally launch a new probe into the vice president's fatal plane crash, framing it as another example of the state avoiding decisive moves.
Namiwa called the logic of spending billions on fertilizer only to spend more billions on relief food for the same people months later completely backwards. He pointed to a recent fertilizer donation from Morocco as a sign of a missed opportunity for local production. The group's fix involves letting commercial farmers grow crops for the state grain marketer to sell cheaply later.
Their complaints did not stop at agriculture. CDEDI also ripped into the government over the ongoing foreign exchange mess, demanding real action to stop money leaving the country and to boost local manufacturing. They called out the endless fuel crisis too, tying it directly to corruption at the national oil company and sharing what they called evidence with anti-graft bodies. The organization finished with a call to rework mining deals and to finally launch a new probe into the vice president's fatal plane crash, framing it as another example of the state avoiding decisive moves.
