While corn is not native to Malawi, it has become the country's staple crop. Photo: Nathan Laurell (flickr)

Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life; if you give a family seeds, do you feed them forever?

For decades, the people of Malawi have lived with chronic food shortages, prompting massive food aid interventions. But these unending handouts of foreign-grown food are unsustainable, so how can one of the poorest countries in the world enable its population to produce the food they require? One answer is to give the Malawian people the tools to grow it themselves.

A scorching drought ruined the 2005 Malawi growing season. Compounded with an economy that didn’t allow many to plant in the first place, this left the people hungry, reported the New York Times. Five million Malawians, almost 40 percent of the population, required emergency food aid -- the proverbial fish handout. At the time, World Bank policy was to promote cash crops and exports. This incentivized farmers to grow crops for use outside of the country, that would in turn allow they to buy food. But after more than a decade of implementation the strategy had yet to pay off, the Times notes.

After the food crisis in 2005, something changed. Newly elected President Bingu wa Mutharika defied the decades-old advice from the World Bank. Instead of encouraging cash crops, the government started subsidizing fertilizer and maize seeds for the poorest of the poor. At the time, the national poverty rate was at 53 percent, so this was a huge undertaking. This move defied the conventional wisdom of the West and the World Bank and carried a sizable risk of alienation and failure, reports the Times.

Despite these challenges, the government of Malawi distributed millions of coupons for two 50-kilogram bags of fertilizer -- enough to treat an acre -- and seeds to fill half that space. These coupons allowed the holders to purchase fertilizer and seed at a fraction of the retail cost. With such small allowances the program was targeting subsistence or small-scale farmer, who likely only owned a few acres, this giving the common people of Malawi the tools to support themselves.

The crops and fertilizer, when combined with the abundant rainfall of 2006, completely transformed the barren landscape. Maize production more than doubled that year, from 1.2 million metric tons to 2.7. By 2007, production was up to 3.4 million and instead of importing food aid, Malawi became the largest exporter of corn in Southern Africa to the World Food Program.

However this success has come at a cost. Between 2008 and 2009, the government of Malawi dedicated a full 16 percent of the national budget for seed and fertilizer subsidies. This strain prevented other projects, such as irrigation systems, from getting off the ground. And some question the sustainability of the subsidies. Elizabeth Sibale, a consultant at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Malawi, commented that “[Malawi is] forgetting all the other problems that affect farmers and putting a Band-Aid on them."

It has been a full six years since the initiation of the subsidy program and it's harvest time again in Malawi. But even as the corn is harvested and processed, the Malawian government is debating the future of the subsidies. The program officially ends in June and while the program has been successful at raising corn production and lowering poverty levels, the true cost of the subsidies has been steep.

So the question remains: Are fertilizer subsidies teaching families to fish, or are they just handouts wrapped in a new package? The answer seems to be somewhere in between. Ensuring access to seeds and fertilizer is an important step in reducing poverty, but it is only one step. In 2004, about 60 percent of Malawi's population was impoverished. Today the poverty rate has fallen to 40 percent. These numbers seem to suggest that the idea is working, but the remaining poverty level demonstrates that it’s not enough.

More than 70 percent of the population in the Congo is impoverished, making the country extremely vulnerable to price shocks. Photo: Jenny Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Wildfires in Russia. Revolution in the Middle East. Rising oil prices — these seemingly unconnected events have cumulated in a weak global harvest that will place additional burden on families whose budgets are already stretched thin.

According to a United Nations press conference earlier this month, food prices hit record levels earlier this year. Citing data gathered from the World Bank, the UN reported that rice posted gains of 21 percent, whereas corn and wheat jumped 64 and 68 percent from last year. While this increase has yet to be reflected in markets and grocery stores, a rise is surely on its way.

In the press conference, the UN noted that the world’s poorest people, living on less than $2 a day, are now spending an average of 15 percent more to cover basic nutritional needs. What is more, the World Bank estimates that the spike in food costs has pushed a further 44 million people into extreme poverty.

To help get a better sense of how rising food prices are impacting people in different parts of the world, check out this great graphic developed by a UC Berkley graduate student. The graphic draws on data collected by the Economic Research Service of the USDA.

However, it's important to remember that much is lost in these statistics. Household grown food, or food resulting from bartering is not measured. The data also misses the effect of food or crop subsidies.

There are other critical questions as well, such as who in each country will bear the burden of increasing prices. Traditionally such hardships are placed on those least able to respond and as food prices continue to rise, the poverty rate is likely to follow.

If you think that the global food crisis is taking a toll on countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Mexico, imagine what its like for those living in Ethiopia. Alex Perry’s report from Kersa, Ethiopia for Time Magazine paints a grim picture:

The day photographer Thomas Dworzak and I arrived at Kuyera, four children died. There were four more the next day…. On that first day, I glimpsed Ayano in the intensive care room, wrapped in a red and blue blanker, struggling to breathe, his eyes tipped back into his skull. When I next saw him, he was trussed up the blanket that had become his death shroud, lying on a slab next to two other small bundles in the morgue…. For five days, we turned our hired SUV into an ambulance, ferrying bodies of dead children back to their villages, picking up the starving and taking them to Kuyera.

Ethiopia faces a major crisis — chronic drought coupled with food prices that have risen 330 percent in the past year and a population that has doubled in size since the mid-1980s.

Yet nature alone is not to blame for Ethiopia's food crisis. Some argue that the government's tight control of the agricultural sector that puts all land under state ownership exacerbates Ethiopia's food insecurity. The distribution of fertilizer and seeds are government-controlled, and while farmers can choose what they want to grow, the Los Angeles Times reports that some 20,000 agricultural advisors, also functioning as tax collectors, keep close tabs of what is being grown.

This week, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that "despite the best efforts of the government and humanitarian community to respond to the crisis the needs of people continue to far outstrip the resources available to hand."

Yet surrounding the famine are lush fields of green — feeding goats and cattle — while children continue to die of hunger. It is the harsh reality of what is being called "green hunger" or "green drought" — starvation amidst plenty. A recent BBC article describes it as "the time when the land is full of new shoots but there is no food. It happens because the last rains failed and few crops were planted."

Images posted by Reuters photographer Radu Sigheti puts a face to the crisis in an intimate visit with the Mohamed family during the loss of their young daughter, Michu, who died of malnutrition.

Other children will likely suffer the same fate. Recent government figures estimate some 75,000 children under the age of five in the country are severely malnourished. Among all Ethiopians, more than 4.5 million are in need of emergency food aid.

Now is the time for us to help fill Ethiopia's need. As Mark Lang from the Christian relief agency Tearfund writes in the Times Online, "This is no time to give Ethiopians a compassion fatigued brush-off."

Photo: guuleed (Flickr)