Malawi’s Maize Marketing System

Thomas Jayne (), Nicholas Sitko, Jacob Ricker-Gilbert () and Julius H. Mangisoni

No 62162, Food Security Collaborative Working Papers from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics

Abstract: National food security in Malawi depends on improving the performance of maize markets. Ensuring that grain is consistently available at tolerable prices is crucial for consumers’ food security. At the same time, surplus producing farmers need to receive farm-gate prices consistently above production costs to intensify the use of fertilizer and other productivity enhancing technologies in a sustainable manner. These concerns give rise to the classic food price dilemma for policy makers in Malawi: how to keep prices low enough to ensure low income consumers’ access to food while keeping prices high enough to promote farm production incentives. These tensions cannot be avoided but they can be relieved through reducing food marketing margins, which shrink the wedge between producer and consumer prices. Moreover, Malawi faces major political and economic problems associated with food price instability especially given its dependence on rain fed agriculture in a region prone to drought. These issues show that improving the performance of maize markets is at the core of achieving sustainable food security and poverty reduction in Malawi.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Food Security and Poverty; International Development; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65
Date: 2010-02-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/62162/files/Ma ... ort_to-DFID-SOAS.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:midcwp:62162

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.62162

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Food Security Collaborative Working Papers from Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().