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"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...

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

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. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached." (The New York Times, "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts")

Posted by Ginger on December 2, 2007 08:26 AM |

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Ginger Heatter

vmheatter[@]gmail.com

Projects

Cornell University / MFA

Epoch / print literary magazine (Associate Editor)

The New Hampshire Review / online poetry magazine - temporary hiatus (Editor)

Self Republication / via YouTube

See Here, Can You Spare a Moment? / reading highlights Updated: 12/20/07

Recent & Forthcoming Work

Swink: Online Edition
The Literary Review
The Cincinnati Review
32 Poems
Cranky
Fugue
American Literary Review
Poetry Daily
Southern Poetry Review
Third Coast
The Litlab

Reading

Apr. 13, 2007
8 p.m., The Poets' Corner
Unitarian Universalist Church
of Nashua
58 Lowell Street

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