LILONGWE, Malawi - Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost 5 million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the UN World Food Program than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.
In Malawi, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the UN Children's Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround - one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa - with one word: fertilizer.
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free-market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.
But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi's newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi's soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.
"As long as I'm president, I don't want to be going to other capitals begging for food," Mutharika said. The country's successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.
In an evaluation of the World Bank's record on African agriculture, its internal watchdog concluded in October that not only had the removal of subsidies led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in Africa, but that the bank had often failed to recognize that improving Africa's soil quality was essential to lifting food production.
