Free fertilizer better for crops than free market ideology. Who knew?

New York Times :

"Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five 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 World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe."

Additionally three tons of stock-piled powdered milk was sent on to Uganda instead.

So how was this economic miracle achieved?

By doing what the west does, not what it preaches :

Farmers used fertilizer instead of free market ideology on their crops.

"Over the past 20 years, the World bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically 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.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.
In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an
economist at the University of London.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort."

But after the disastrous 2005 harvest, Malawi’s newly elected president implemented a policy of government subsidies for seed and fertilizer.

Last year, half the country’s farming families received coupons to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer for around for around $15, or about a third the market price, along with enough seed to plant less than half an acre.

As a consequence, farmers were able to double or triple their food crops, resulting in lower food prices and higher wages for farm workers. The government will also give farmers a direct say in the distribution of this year's subsidies.

Simple really. Crops thrive much better on fertilizer than they do on colonialist free market bullshit.