Is the Hoe a Symptom of Poverty?

On July 11 the Malawi media carried a story that the Civil Society Agriculture Network (CISANET) was organizing a national conference entitled “Malawi Agriculture at 50”. Explaining the reasons for the conference, a spokesman of CISANET said, “Malawi agriculture remains underdeveloped 50 years after independence as evidenced by the continued use of hand hoes for tillage by the majority of the country’s smallholder farmers. A hand hoe remains the primary farm equipment in an era where technology drives production processes”.

The conference was held on July 30 and 31. Reading news reports of the conference, I was impressed by the list of speakers. There were agriculture professors, a cabinet minister, and prominent economists. But my thoughts keep coming back to the statement made by the CISANET spokesman. I had never thought of the simple hoe as a symptom of all that is wrong with Malawi agriculture. You can extend this by stating that the hoe is a symptom of Malawi poverty because subsistence agriculture is very closely tied to the wellbeing of Malawians.

Let me paint a picture of life in rural Malawi for those who are not familiar with subsistence farming. About 80 percent of Malawians live in rural areas. Most of these rural Malawians rely on subsistence farming. This means a family has about one or two acres (roughly half to one hectare) of farm land. The family buys several hoes and fixes each to a wooden handle. Some areas of Malawi prefer to till while bent at the waist so they make hoe handles that are about one meter or shorter while others till standing so their hoe handles are two meters or longer.

When I was young in the 1970s and 1980s, we used to wake up at 4 a.m. with each family member carrying a hoe on the shoulder to go farming. Our farmland was about two miles from home. On a school day we would farm until around 7 a.m. and then go to school. On a weekend or holiday day we would farm until around 4 p.m. The actual farming work depended on the season. The hardest work was making ridges. The practice was to dig last year’s ridges and turn them into troughs between new ridges with last year’s troughs becoming new ridges. Maize (corn) or groundnut (peanut) or bean seeds would then be planted on the new ridges. The seed was either from the previous year’s harvest or purchased from the agriculture shop.

Over the years there have been several efforts by the Malawi government to ease the tilling work of the subsistence farmer. In the 1960s, the Malawi government noted that there were many cattle in rural Malawi. Farmers were encouraged to purchase ox-drawn ploughs. But ploughs turned out to be too expensive for the majority of farmers. Besides, not everybody had cattle.

The biggest effort targeted at reducing hand farming came with a World Bank funded project called Lilongwe Land Development Programme (LLDP). This was a very big project that covered most of Lilongwe throughout the 1970s. The project encompassed many sectors of life including agriculture, shopping centers, health centers, instruction centers, land demarcation, and even building roads and bridges. The idea was to transform rural Lilongwe into communities centered at small towns called units. The rural economies would then operate as cooperatives. Each unit would have most machinery that farmers need and also provide a loan program. If a farmer needed a diesel driven tractor to plough land, they would rent one from the unit and plough his/her land. Viewed from a child’s eyes the LLDP project was very successful. However, my reading later revealed that the project was successful only in its initial years but was a failure overall. One thing I remember is that it did very little to influence the use of the hand hoe for farming. Very few people bothered to rent the agricultural equipment at the unit.

When World Bank funding of LLDP came to an end, the Malawi government negotiated further funding to turn it into a national program called the National Rural Development Programme (NRDP). Thus LLDP was like a pilot project. Under NRDP, the country was divided into eight development divisions. The one in Lilongwe became Lilongwe Agricultural Development Division. Farmers in rural areas were supposed to meet with an extension expert twice a month to learn new farming methods. People who were committed to these meetings received farming loans. But only wealthy farmers signed on to this commitment. Most rural farmers continued using the simple hoe and never joined the groups that met the experts.

Modern efforts have been introduced in this millennium to replace the NRDP. All systems either have limited success or are failures. Fifty years after independence we are still talking about subsistence farmers using hoes for their tilling.

Malawi is going through a midlife crisis. She is asking herself, “What have I done in the 50 years of my independence?” Many have written to point fingers at what or who is to blame for Malawi’s failure to rid herself of poverty. Some blame the laziness of Malawians. I disagree with this assertion. Others blame the lack of visionary leaders. But some of the leaders were very visionary to the extent that we ridiculed their “dreams”. Yet others blame corruption. Whereas Malawi has become more corrupt than before, my suspicion is that corruption itself if a symptom of a deeper problem. I will write a rebuttal of these diagnoses at another time. Most commentators are not identifying the actual problem. They all know there is a problem of poverty but they don’t agree on its causes. It follows that a solution to the problem cannot be identified.

It would be presumptuous of me to suggest that I succeeded in finding the problem that more intelligent people have failed to find. But many problems in rural Malawi are rooted on the fact that people do not store enough food and harvest in years of plenty for use when lean years come. As a nation whose majority relies on subsistence farming, Malawi is vulnerable to famine arising from droughts. I am not stating anything new here. It was in an attempt to solve this problem that Malawi built food storage facilities. In addition to these facilities, there is a commission for disaster preparedness. The only problem is that, for some reason, people still die of hunger in drought years. Either the storage facilities are never used or the preparedness is not done.

Jeff Sachs wrote in his book “The End of Poverty” that a nation gets out of poverty when it has 80 percent of its population in urban areas and 20 percent in farming. Of course, the few farmers need machinery to feed the many people who live in towns. Using a hoe cannot do. By this metric Malawi’s situation is dire.

Is the hoe a symptom of poverty? No. Manual work is not a symptom of poverty. Thousands of people do manual work in China. Due to cheap labor accrued from such manual work, many corporations in the western hemisphere are moving their manufacturing operations to China. The fact that rural people do manual work is not in itself a symptom of poverty. The lack of supporting industries, facilities, and structures for the farmer is a symptom, and probably cause, of poverty.