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A recent report by ActionAid identifies poor economic policies - for which the International Monetary Fund must share the blame - as a major contributing factor leading to over 1,000 starvation deaths in Malawi.

The following article is based on information in a landmark report, State of Diaster: Causes, Consequences and Policy Lessons from Malawi released by ActionAid on June 13, 2002. The full report written chiefly by Stephen Devereux, along with a summary prepared by ActionAid USA (Death by Starvation in Malawi:

Some of the conclusions in this article are extrapolated from the evidence and analysis in the report but may not represent the position of ActionAid of its affiliates. The 50 Years Is Enough Network take full responsibility for the content of this article). Reports of a devastating famine in Malawi first surfaced as rumours coming from rural areas of the country around October 2001.

Malawians in the cities including government officials in Lilongwe, the capital, were slow to believe or act on, the persistent accounts.

Even when well-known advocacy groups like the Malawi Economic Justice Network (MEJN) and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace presented data to back up the reports they were dismissed as lacking credibility.

But incredible as it may have seemed Malawi - hardly a desert state, but a densely-populated country in a lush region - rally was facing catastrophic food shortages in the wake of a combination of flooding and a regional drought and after over a decade of 'structural adjustment' policies designed by the International Monetary Fund.

The crisis in rural Malawi finally hit the headlines on 22 February, 2002 when MEJN succeeded in attracting attention to its call for government and donor action. It demanded that 'the Government should acknowledge that there is hunger in Malawi; make a holding of maize a crime, subsidise the price of maize in Malawi; government and civil society should provide food supplies to vulnerable groups'. At this point, the mainstream international media started broadcasting reports of a famine emergency, desperation and critical food shortages.

An international blame game has emerged between the Government of Malawi and the IMF. Malawi's President, Bakili Muluzi declared: 'the IMF is to blame of the biting food crisis.

They insisted the government sell maize from its strategic reserve and requested that the government abandon its starter pack agricultural subsidy programme.' The IMF's representative in Malawi commented: 'We have no expertise in food security policy and we did not instruct the Malawi Government or the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) to dispose of the reserves.'

An intensively agricultural country like Malawi should with adequate planning, have been able to endure a year of localised flooding (2000-2001) followed by a year of drought. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has made his reputation by showing that killer famines do not occur simply because of whether or natural disasters, but arise from a combination of factors which usually includes the subordination of common sense planning to political distortions, ranging from war or military occupation to corruption. Sen's most famous corollary to this observation is that democracies do not suffer famines, since the government must be responsive to the population.

But Malawi is a democracy, at least formally, even if it is hardly a model democracy (President Muluzi recently said he would not resist the label 'dictator'). One of the questions that must be asked in light of the ActionAid report, which find that the IMF must share the blame for permitting at least 1,000 people to die of hunger in Malawi is whether a government under intense pressure from the IMF and similar financial institutions to accept inappropriate policies is afflicted with a political distortion serious enough that it can no longer be called 'democratic'.

-Third World Network Features.

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