To be clear, nature has dealt Malawi cruel blows. In the past three years we have suffered back-to-back climate disasters – from Cyclone Freddy’s floods in 2023 to an intense drought in 2024. Rains that millions of subsistence farmers depend on simply failed. But hunger here is not merely an imported disaster of weather or war.
Yes, global shocks like COVID-19 and the Ukraine war drove up fuel and fertiliser prices, and we feel those ripples in our markets. Yet the harsh truth is that much of this suffering was avoidable. It was born of our own leaders’ policy failures and chronic mismanagement.
As a young Malawian, I feel both anger and deep disappointment. We trusted our government to safeguard our food security, instead, it squandered resources and failed to prepare, even as warnings of drought grew louder.
Nothing exemplifies this betrayal more than the fiasco of the Affordable Inputs Programme (AIP), Malawi’s flagship farm subsidy meant to assist poor smallholders with cheap fertiliser and seed. In theory, AIP should be our safety net against exactly this kind of crisis.
By the time this absurd deal unravelled, precious funds were gone, and fertiliser bags were nowhere to be seen. The result? Thousands of farmers received nothing at all. I spoke to villagers who walked for miles to buy fertiliser only to find empty warehouses. Some tried to plant without it; others simply left fields fallow in despair. When the rains failed, it was a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe, human folly compounding nature’s fury.
Today, Malawi’s vaunted food security has utterly frayed. Millions of families harvested almost nothing this year. I meet parents who can only feed their children one sparse meal a day, surviving on wild yams and banana stems, a desperation diet we remember from the famines of decades past. Malnutrition is spiking; the stunting rate among under-fives, already around 37%, is bound to climb higher. In some communities, clinics report rising cases of children suffering acute wasting.
We are literally watching a generation’s potential being stolen by hunger. And it did not have to be this way. The World Food Programme has warned this is Malawi’s worst hunger in over a decade, appealing for emergency aid. But our government should never have let it get this bad. Instead, it dithered. It failed to stockpile maize when times were good, failed to reform AIP before it collapsed, and failed to crack down on the cartels that jack up food prices.
Meanwhile, the politically connected grew richer. As people starve, we read of officials siphoning money from grain reserves, of dubious procurement deals for cheap maize that never arrived. Such scandals are an insult to every Malawian struggling to afford a bag of maize.
Walk through the markets in Blantyre or Lilongwe and you will feel the desperation. A 50kg bag of maize, our staple nsima flour, now costs what some families earn in a month. Food thefts are on the rise – farmers have had to guard their scant surviving maize from thieves at night. In parts of the south, reports emerged of mothers boiling wild tubers and mangoes just to have something to fill their children’s stomachs.
This is the human face of policy failure: the hungry child, the impoverished farmer, the hopeless youth in the city. Public anger is boiling over. In the past year, protests have erupted in our major cities over the cost of living and the perceived corruption and incompetence of those in charge. We hear the same platitudes from officials, blaming climate change, pleading for international help, but little acknowledgment that their own misrule helped create this mess.
Frankly, Malawians are tired of excuses. We know climate change is real; we also know that with better leadership we could withstand it. Our neighbours faced the same drought, yet we suffer more. Why? Because Malawi’s leaders did not plan, diversify or invest when they should have.
Still, amid the frustration, I refuse to give in to despair. Instead, I propose a bold path out of this trap, a path that marries common-sense reforms with visionary change. First, we must unleash an irrigation revolution. It beggars’ belief that in 2025, with Lake Malawi at our doorstep and numerous rivers, only a tiny fraction of our farmland is irrigated.
Over 80% of our agriculture remains rain-fed, leaving us one drought away from disaster every year. This has to end. We need massive investment, and I mean yesterday, in irrigation infrastructure, both large-scale and small.
Government and donors should be digging canals, building community dams, and subsidising solar-powered water pumps from Chikwawa to Karonga. In areas where this is already happening, the results are encouraging: farmers grow tomatoes, onions, pigeon peas, rice, beans, even sesame year-round with a reliable water supply.
Yields improve, incomes grow, and hunger recedes. Imagine if such schemes were expanded nationwide. By tapping our lakes and aquifers sustainably, we can drought-proof much of our agriculture.
We can also introduce simple rainwater harvesting and storage in villages to capture the deluges when they do come. Essentially, let us never be caught off guard by a failed rainy season again, we should be prepared to irrigate our way out of it.
Through an initiative with a non-profit, an app called Ulangizi (“Advice”) uses an AI engine to answer farmers’ questions about pests and livestock diseases, even for those who cannot read. I watched a farmer’s eyes light up as the app’s voice explained how to stop a weevil infestation in her sweet potatoes.
This is the future knocking at our door. Technology can help compensate for our lack of agricultural extension officers, bringing knowledge to the remotest hamlet. From climate forecasting text alerts to mobile money crop insurance, digital tools can be a game-changer. But we need to support and scale them.
Crucially, this tech revolution in farming naturally draws in the youth, who are currently a huge untapped resource in Malawi’s agriculture. Young people are often discouraged from farming, they see their parents toil with hoe and hand, at the mercy of floods and droughts, and they want no part of it.
We must change that narrative by making agriculture smart, modern and profitable. Provide youth with start-up capital and innovation hubs for agribusiness, and they will bring drones to monitor crops, solar dryers to preserve harvests, new seed varieties, and entrepreneurial energy.
I have met Malawian youth developing hydroponic veggies, others creating WhatsApp groups to coordinate bulk buying of fertiliser. These are the change-makers we need to invest in. Our job as a nation is to give them the tools and then get out of their way.
Of course, technology and irrigation alone won’t fix a system that is fundamentally unbalanced. Malawi must also diversify its agriculture and exports to break the cycle of dependency. For far too long, we have put most of our eggs in two baskets: maize for food, tobacco for export.
Maize is vital but our over-reliance on it is dangerous, one bad season and millions starve. We need to encourage crop diversity in our fields: drought-tolerant staples like sorghum and millet, nutrient-rich crops like sweet potatoes and groundnuts, and high-value cash crops from macadamia to chilli peppers.
We have to support alternatives, whether it is scaling up tea and sugar production, reviving our once-thriving coffee sector, or moving into agro-processing of fruits and nuts. The goal must be to export more finished products rather than just raw commodities. Why not package Malawi’s own groundnut butter, or sunflower oil, or dried mango, and sell those abroad? That means investing in factories, complying with standards, finding markets, all challenging, but doable with public-private partnerships.
Diversification is not just a buzzword; it is what will cushion our economy and food system against future shocks. We have already seen some success with pigeon peas and soy exports in recent years. With irrigation and good policies, a farmer in Salima could grow rice for local consumption and chilies for export and not be ruined by the failure of one crop. It is about resilience through variety, an old wisdom our grandparents practiced that modern policy somehow forgot.
I have seen village women pool savings to start irrigation on a small plot; I have seen youth volunteers teaching farmers how to use smartphone apps; I have seen local engineers inventing cheaper drip kits for gardens. We are not waiting for saviours; we are starting to save ourselves. What we need now is for those in power to either join this movement for change or make way for those who will. The solutions are on the table; our people have no appetite for empty rhetoric anymore.
We need leaders who treat food security as the national emergency it is, who cut the luxury convoys and allocate funds to grain reserves and irrigation pipes, who punish thieves stealing from hunger relief programmes, who partner with the private sector to get silos, roads, and solar pumps built across the country. For too long, Malawi’s abundant potential has been held hostage by lethargy and greed at the top. That must end now.
I am writing in the voice of someone who imagines a better Malawi, a Malawi where no child goes to bed hungry, where farmers thrive even when rains fail, where our economy is not at the mercy of one crop or one season.
This vision is not far-fetched; it is within our grasp if we learn from the mistakes that led us here. We must combine practical fixes (like subsidising climate-smart fertilisers and extending rural credit) with bold reforms (like overhauling the subsidy programme to actually reach farmers and digitising it to cut out middlemen). We must demand integrity at every level, from a fertiliser tender to a food aid distribution, so that every kwacha goes where it is meant to.
And we, the citizens, must stay vocal and engaged. Real change will not come from one summit or one donor cheque; it will come from sustained pressure and innovation by Malawians ourselves. I believe in our capacity to turn this around. We have done it before on a smaller scale, a little over a decade ago, smart policies and farmer support helped Malawi achieve a bumper maize surplus, showing the world, we could feed ourselves in good years. That progress stalled, then reversed, but it can be reclaimed and surpassed.
Malawi stands at a crossroads. Down one path lies more of the same: hand-to-mouth seasons, perpetual “crises” every time the weather sneezes, and a disenfranchised populace kept alive by foreign aid and fading hope. Down the other path lies a future where we conquer hunger through our own ingenuity and hard work, where we channel our frustration into reform, our pain into purpose. I choose the future of food sovereignty and resilience. It won’t be easy, but the ideas are there, and so are the people to carry them out.
As a citizen, I add my voice to that growing chorus calling for a new approach. No more treating hunger as inevitable. It is not inevitable. It is the outcome of bad choices, and we can make better ones. Malawi’s soil is rich; its people are strong and young; its potential is vast. If we water that potential, literally and figuratively, there is no reason we cannot banish famine and build the thriving, food-secure nation we all dream of.
The time for action is now, before another wasted season passes. The Warm Heart of Africa cannot endure another year of broken promises and empty stomachs. We need change, and we need it today.
*James Woods is a former diplomat with a commendable record of service for Malawi in various European nations, including Belgium, Andorra, France, the Principality of Monaco, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, and the European Union. Complementing his practical experience, James is an MBA holder from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow, Former Mo Ibrahim Foundation and a seasoned entrepreneur. Founder of GlobiQ International
