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Policy Brief No. 55. The Green Belt Initiative and Land Grabs in Malawi

There is often a mismatch between the apparent benevolent intents and the practical manifestations of the large scale land deals. The empirical realities of the large-scale land deals call for critical scrutiny and interrogation of the underlying interests of the stakeholders involved to assess the extent to which they genuinely prioritize win-win scenarios. As the experiences of the Green Belt Initiative (GBI) in Malawi demonstrated, the smallholder farmer is almost always the loser. This raises doubt as to whether the international initiatives such the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) voluntary guidelines on responsible governance of tenure of land and other natural resources; the World Bank’s principles for responsible agricultural investment; and the Africa Union’s (AU) framework and guidelines on land policy shall make any significant difference on the actual outcomes of the large-scale land deals across the continent. Since the introduction of the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) during the 2005/06 growing season, Malawi has featured prominently in the policy debates about food security and revival of the fledging agricultural sector across the continent. The main attraction of the FISP is that it has enabled Malawi to produce decent maize surpluses over and above its annual food requirements now estimated at 2.8 million metric tonnes. Malawi has thus experienced a dramatic shift from being dependent on food aid as well as commercial food imports due to pervasive food insecurity and chronic food shortages to self sufficiency at household and national levels including becoming a donor to food deficit countries such as Lesotho and Swaziland (Chinsinga, 2007 and Dorward, et al., 2008). Other African countries are being called upon to emulate Malawi’s agricultural model through which it has pioneered the implementation of smart