Malawi: The climate crisis is pushing food farmers into starvation
Malawian farmers barely have a carbon footprint. But they are starving because a heated globe has delivered them one catastrophe after another
Jack McBrams in Lilongwe
In Mujiwa Village in Mulanje, on Malawi’s southern border with Mozambique, Bigborn Juwawo’s once thriving maize field is littered with rocks dropped by Cyclone Freddy last year. Dry patches of sandy soil dominate the rest of the field. The April harvests from Juwawo’s three fields used to be enough to feed his family for a year. Now, they barely get by.
“With six children to care for, life is very hard,” said the 44-year-old farmer.
“This year, things are even worse because the dry spells go on and on. After the cyclone, we got some supplies donated, but now it’s every person for themselves.”
Such hardship now affects nearly two million Malawian farmers, said Malawian president Lazarus Chakwera, who declared a state of disaster for the fourth time in as many years.
The latest devastation is largely because of the El Niño weather phenomenon which has cast dry spells over some countries while raining unusually heavy torrents in others. Chakwera said 749,000 hectares of maize – over 44% of the national crop area – have been damaged by the effects of El Niño.
“This situation is devastating,” Chakwera said. “It would have been catastrophic even if this were the first disaster in recent years. Unfortunately, this marks the fourth time in four years that I have declared a state of disaster.”
The president has appealed for $200-million in food aid for the affected people in 23 of the country’s 28 districts.
A deadly combination of raging cyclones made stronger by climate change, and local environmental devastation driven by deforestation, has driven Malawi to the verge of famine. As much as 40% of Malawi’s population is facing hunger, according to a statement from the World Food Programme released last week to echo the president’s appeal. Cyclone Freddy in March 2023 was the worst in Malawi’s recorded history.
Its heavy rains caused multiple floods and landslides in the south of the country, killing 679 people, and 537 people are missing. At least 2,186 were injured and more than 659,278 were displaced. A postdisaster assessment found that it wiped $36-million from Malawi’s economy in production losses. Forty-five percent of that loss was from crops devastated by floods – 60,000 hectares, equivalent to 27% of the planted acreage that year, were flooded.
But even before that disaster, 20% of Malawians were expected to struggle with food. Freddy came after Storm Ana and Cyclone Gombe in 2022, which destroyed sanitation infrastructure, setting off one of Malawi’s worst cholera outbreaks.
As national maize stocks run low because local farmers were producing much less, the country was forced to import staples like maize, rice, soya beans, cowpeas, and groundnuts.
But import costs and scarcity have driven maize prices to nearly double in just one year. Today’s prices are triple the five-year average.
Unable to produce food on their farms, unable to afford food from the shops, and bereft of aid, farmers like Juwawo face an unyielding future of endless starvation.