Cook, eat, man, woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi

Abstract

The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern
Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women’s empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and
Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or conducive, to freedom.

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Cook, eat, man, woman: understanding
the New Alliance for Food Security
and Nutrition, nutritionism and its
alternatives from Malawi
Raj Patel, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Lizzie Shumba & Laifolo Dakishoni
Published online: 20 Nov 2014.
To cite this article: Raj Patel, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Lizzie Shumba & Laifolo Dakishoni
(2014): Cook, eat, man, woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food Security and
Nutrition, nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2014.971767
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Cook, eat, man, woman: understanding the New Alliance for Food
Security and Nutrition, nutritionism and its alternatives from Malawi
Raj Patel, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Lizzie Shumba and Laifolo Dakishoni
The Group of Eight Countries (G8) launched the New Alliance for Food Security and
Nutrition to improve nutritional outcomes through private sector involvement in
agricultural development. The accession of Malawi to the Alliance reveals the
assumptions behind the intervention. We show that while the New Alliance may
seem to have little to do with nutrition, its emergence as a frame for the privatization
of food and agriculture has been decades in the making, and is best understood as an
outcome of a project of nutritionism. To highlight the failings of the approach, we
present findings from the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Initiative in northern
Malawi, which has demonstrated success in combatting malnutrition through a
combination of agroecological farming practices, community mobilization, women’s
empowerment and changes in intrahousehold gender dynamics. Contrasting a
political economic analysis of the New Alliance alongside that of the Soils, Food and
Healthy Communities Initiative shows the difference between a concern with the
gendered social context of malnutrition, and nutritionism. We conclude with an
analysis of the ways that nutrition can play a part in interventions that are inimical, or
conducive, to freedom.
Keywords: New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition; agroecology; nutritionism;
gender; Malawi; Africa; food security; food sovereignty
I. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition
Following the recession and food price inflation of 2007–2008, the number of malnourished
people topped 1 billion.
1
In 2009, at the Group of Eight Countries (G8)
2
summit in
L’Aquila, Italy, the world’s richest countries pledged USD 22 billion over 3 years to
© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of the named
author(s) have been asserted.
The authors would like to thank Steve James for suggesting the title, and the participants of seminars
at the University of California, Berkeley, Center for African Studies and the Rhodes University’s
UHURU Humanities Lecture series for incisive comments on early presentations of this work. We
also thank the SFHC community promoters for further insights into gender relations in their commu-
nities. The authors are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful com-
ments. The usual disclaimer applies.
1
This figure was subsequently revised downward by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
United Nations (FAO) in a statistical recalculation that has attracted controversy. As Lappé et al.
note, the FAO revised the figure down from a peak of 1 billion in 2009 to a history in which
hunger peaked in 1990 at 1 billion and has been falling, more or less, ever since (Lappé et al. 2013).
2
The Group of Eight countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the
USA, with additional representation by the EU.
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address hunger. Four years later, half the pledges had materialized (Henriques 2013). In the
intervening period, the G8 had developed new policies through which hunger might be
managed. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was unveiled under the US
presidency of the G8 in May 2012 (The White House 2013). This late entry into the
post-2008 ledger of international commitments to tackle hunger was remarkable for its
shift away from pledges centred on government intervention, and its turn toward the
private sector as the remedy to both chronic and acute hunger and malnutrition. Six
countries were included in the New Alliance’sfirst round of partnerships –Ghana, Ethiopia,
Tanzania, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Mozambique –in an effort to ‘lift 50 million
people in sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty in the next 10 years by supporting agricultural
development’(USAID 2013b).
Bearing the hallmark not only of the Obama administration, but of politics within the
G8 more broadly, the New Alliance was built around a governance model of public–
private partnerships (Allcott, Lederman, and López 2006). Often, the private sector took
the lead in drafting policy. The frameworks for the agricultural component of the New Alli-
ance come from documents like the World Economic Forum’sAchieving the new vision for
agriculture: new models for action (World Economic Forum 2013).
3
These documents in
turn emerge from the collaborative processes between the private sector, philanthropy and
donor agencies that have advocated a shift towards ‘creative capitalism’in the agricultural
sector in the Global South (Kinsley, Clarke, and Banerjee 2008; Curtis and Hilary 2012;
Koopman 2012).
Those commentators who see in the New Alliance the shaping of development policy
by the needs of transnational capital are not wrong (Holt-Gimenez 2013; Sulle and Hall
2013; War on Want 2013; Murphy 2014). In this paper, we advance the analysis of food
policy by asking how manifestos for private sector agricultural capitalism have become
policy vehicles for ending hunger. By locating the policy manoeuvres behind the New Alli-
ance in thinking that emerges in a moment of free-market triumphalism at the end of the
Cold War, we are able to point to a logic of ‘nutritionism’–understood as a set of ideas
and practices that seek to end hunger not by directly addressing poverty but by prioritizing
the delivery of individual molecular components of food to those lacking them –that
propels the New Alliance forward. The way nutritionism comes to matter, however, is
not through the battering ram of aid, or by imperial decree. The idea of nutritionism
does not float freely (Risse-Kappen 1994). It is articulated with the possibility of material
shifts in ways to control land and state resources within both the Global North and the
Global South. We provide an analysis that complicates a facile reading of the New Alliance
as a pure imposition of foreign capital’s will on a naïve or helpless local democracy.
Second, given the pervasion of nutritionism through development policy, we explore
the question of whether there are ways of recuperating the basic ideas of nutrition to
address human health without succumbing to nutritionism. In asking this question, we
do not dismiss the fact that the main reason for malnutrition is poverty, disenfranchisement,
exploitation and marginalization. We do, however, think it worth asking whether it is poss-
ible for any approach for ending hunger to use the term ‘nutrition’without being co-opted
by a discourse that would speak of malnutrition in the absence of politics. To do that, we
examine the New Alliance alongside an initiative in northern Malawi, the Recipe Days of
an organization named ‘Soils, Food and Healthy Communities’, which offers an antidote to
3
It is a document in which the words ‘gender’and ‘women’appear once each.
2Raj Patel et al.
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orthodox development policy, while signalling a politics that, we argue, breaks with some
of the deeper tenets of the New Alliance.
Let us turn first to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. The ‘win–win’
policy approach lauded at the time of the Alliance’s launch was celebrated as a form of
‘enlightened capitalism’(White 2013). The United States Agency for International Devel-
opment (USAID) reminded the world that ‘Africa’s economic growth, with agriculture as a
strong driver, is creating substantial new business opportunities, and the rate of return on
foreign investment in Africa is higher than in any other developing region’(USAID
2013a). The Alliance’s goal was to harness this growth to the service of economic
growth and, thereby, a reduction in hunger and malnutrition.
Raj Shah –the Administrator for USAID who birthed the New Alliance through his
organization –argued for the vital importance of the private sector in agricultural develop-
ment with these words: ‘We are never going to end hunger in Africa without private invest-
ment. There are things that only companies can do, like building silos for storage and
developing seeds and fertilizers’(Shah quoted in Strom 2012).
In the original Green Revolution, silos, agricultural research and fertilizer distribution
were often the domain of the public sector, as were the subsidies and public infrastructure
necessary to sustain grain storage, marketing and agricultural extension (Perkins 1997;
Ross 1998; Cullather 2010; Patel 2013). Silos have been built, seeds developed and ferti-
lizers used in the past without multinational corporations. When Raj Shah suggests that it is
impossible to eradicate hunger without transnational capital, the statement must be parsed
not as a reflection of historical truth, nor as a logical impossibility, but as an attempt to
create a twenty-first century political necessity.
Shah’s historical revision, in which transnational corporations became indispensable,
swiftly led to the criticism that the New Alliance was an attempt by G8 countries to
impose the will of favoured private-sector entities onto African countries. In a bid to pre-
empt the accusation, the New Alliance made clear that it operated by ‘mobilizing private
capital, taking innovation to scale, managing risk’(USAID 2013b), by building on existing
country development plans. Such plans could be found in the Comprehensive Africa Agri-
culture Development Program (CAADP).
4
By articulating the New Alliance with previous
endogenous efforts to increase the involvement of the private sector in agriculture, the New
Alliance is able to imply that African governments have already accepted the premises of its
intervention.
Debates about whether increased agricultural private investment improves food security
for the poor are, however, far from resolved (Bezner Kerr et al. 2012; McMichael 2013;
Wood et al. 2013). The New Alliance doesn’t seem to read McMichael, but rather insists
on the impossibility of ending hunger without the assistance of the international private
sector. Through this stifling of debate about the merits of the private sector, it appears as
if international capital is imposing its will upon benighted Africans (Holt-Giménez 2008;
Holt-Gimenez, Altieri, and Rosset 2008; Bellwood-Howard 2014). It isn’t wrong to see
the New Alliance as the G8’s latest attempt to spear-carry for the international agrofood
industry, but it is important to take seriously the New Alliance’s assertion that in bringing
4
The CAADP was an initiative of the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Develop-
ment (NEPAD), formalized in 2003 to address agricultural issues on the continent. Its goals include
agriculture-led growth, a 6-percent average annual agricultural growth rate at the national level, and
‘Implementation principles, including program implementation by countries, coordination by regional
economic bodies, and facilitation by the NEPAD Secretariat’(NEPAD 2005). See also Loxley (2003).
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neoliberal market forces and international corporations to agriculture, it is only doing to
African countries what they have chosen to do to themselves. It is hard to do interpretive
work simply by presenting the New Alliance as an imperial fiat. To do so robs African gov-
ernments, private sector and people of any agency. Better, it helps to think of the Alliance’s
mode of public–private partnership as involving the configuration of a particular hegemonic
bloc, and relations to the means of production (Anderson 1977; Gramsci and Buttigieg
1992; Gill and Law 1993). The idea of a historic bloc –led by a bourgeoisie making alli-
ances and compromises, and using coercion and consent to maintain hegemony –prompts
us to examine African countries’responses and motivations in accepting the New Alliance.
We can see both the membership of the bloc, and its constitution, by observing that the
Alliance has resources that have been lacking in the transformation of African agriculture.
New Alliance donors’commitments total a little under half a billion US dollars over 3 years
(Table 1).
That Norway should be such a substantial donor to the initiative may at first appear mys-
terious, but becomes clearer when one examines the provenance of the corporations that
form part of the New Alliance (Figure 1).
Business and Northern governments aren’t alone in this bloc. They are joined both by
philanthropic and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indeed, the NGO ‘ONE’
authored Figure 1 to defend the Alliance against charges that it was a vehicle for large-
scale agribusiness from the Global North to take over Africa. Conceding that the largest
single donor was the Norwegian fertilizer corporation Yara (with initial commitments in
2012 at USD 1.5 billion), followed by Swiss seed giant Syngenta (USD 500 million),
ONE offered that a Tanzanian company had ‘sizeable investments’, pointing to the Tanza-
nian company Agro EcoEnergy’s USD 425-million commitment. Unfortunately, closer
scrutiny reveals the Tanzanian company to be an offshoot of a Swedish group that has
been involved in conflict with local smallholders over its need for large areas of farmland
on which to grow crops for biofuels (Locher and Sulle 2013; Widgren 2014).
5
These figures
Table 1. Development partners for the New Alliance for Food Security and
Nutrition.
Development partners Total US$
Belgium/Flanders (Flanders International Cooperation Agency) 18.1 m
Canada 12.3 m
Germany 0.67 m
European Union 160.8 m
Ireland 38.7 m
Japan 10.6 m
Norway 102.0 m
United Kingdom (Department for International Development) 96.3 m
US (United States Agency for International Development) 53.7 m*
Total 493.1 m
* The US government has only declared its contribution from 2013 to 2014 due to domestic
budgetary politics.
Source: New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (2013).
5
Tanzania’s experience with the New Alliance has revealed a suite of problems with implementation,
transparency and the promotion of large-scale agriculturalists over the concerns of poorer small-scale
farmers (Sulle and Hall 2013).
4Raj Patel et al.
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point unambiguously to the kind of agriculture envisioned by the New Alliance: large scale,
export driven, chemically intensive, centralized knowledge and expertise in the (mainly
foreign) private sector.
Yet the Alliance’s bloc also involves ‘local partners’. In every country in which the Alli-
ance is forged, a country cooperation framework has been drafted. In this paper, we
examine the case of Malawi, and use the Country Cooperation Framework, together with
interviews with key stakeholders, as the basis of the analysis in this section (New Alliance
for Food Security and Nutrition 2013). Malawi was a later arrival to the New Alliance, with
the signing of its commitments announced under the UK’s chair of the G8 at a hunger
summit in June 2013. Malawi is an appropriate candidate for initiatives to tackle hunger
and malnutrition (UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2013). The choice by
then-President Joyce Banda to commit Malawi to the alliance may, however, have had
less to do with the Alliance’s capacity to eradicate stunting, or indeed halve it in 10
years, as Banda hoped (Banda 2013), than with Malawi’s recent International Monetary
Fund (IMF)-encouraged currency devaluation and need for foreign direct investment to
offset balance-of-payments issues. The formation of hegemonic blocs is characterized by
both consensual and coercive behaviour –the latter term being particularly appropriate
in describing the relationship between the government of Malawi and the donor community
in the setting of domestic monetary policy. Indeed, as Attwell (2013) suggests, the relation-
ships that make contingent future loans (and current creditworthiness) on the kind of spend-
ing that is possible within the domestic sphere have vital impacts. They flow through
monetary policy to shape the possibilities of responding to events such as famine and
chronic hunger, such as Malawi experienced in the early 2000s (Devereux 2002).
The exigencies of foreign capital flows may explain the haste with which the govern-
ment released a Country Cooperation Framework. After swift consultation with the
private sector –though there were no meetings with civil society groups –and a mere
three months after President Banda’s London visit, the government of Malawi released
its framework document (New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition 2013). The docu-
ment contains the goals of different international donor agencies and the private sector, as
well as undertakings by the government of Malawi, to meet partnership requirements under
Figure 1. Total investment of companies in the New Alliance by country of origin.
Source: Hong and ONE (2014).
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the Alliance. The Alliance announced that it will lift 1.7 million Malawians out of poverty
by 2022. In order to do that, business, donors and government will work in concert. The
government of Malawi’s commitments are the most detailed and specific, and are headlined
by the following ‘policy indicators’to increase food security and reduce malnutrition.
Those policy indicators, as found in the framework document, are:
.Improved score on Doing Business Index to among top 100 economies
.Increased dollar value of private sector investment in the agriculture sector and value
added agro-processing
.Increased private investment in commercial production, sale of inputs and produce
and value addition (New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition 2013,6)
These are the only metrics that appear in the New Alliance country document. They lack
any explicit mention of nutrition or food security, which has led many commentators to
observe that, at its heart, the New Alliance is really about neither. Such a view would be
bolstered by a close reading of the private-sector commitments to the Alliance (Table 2).
With US$51.7 million from Malawian registered companies and US$88 million from
overseas, the partnership’s umbrella covers substantial investments. These are not,
however, new commitments, but ones that companies declared within their current plans
of operation. Nonetheless, the scope is ambitious. The tobacco company Alliance One
Tobacco (Malawi) Limited, a supplier to the global tobacco industry, has outlined specific
plans in its 7-year plan which, in addition to growing more tobacco, include:
to harvest 300,000 metric tonnes of maize (currently 36,000 metric tonnes), 145,000 metric
tonnes of soya (currently 1600 metric tonnes), 40,000 metric tonnes of flue-cured tobacco (cur-
rently 6800 metric tonnes), and 90,000 metric tonnes of burley tobacco (currently 50,000
metric tonnes). This will require an increase in related employment from 71,000 (current)
to 181,000 (end-state) as well as an increase in land utilized in production from 61,000 hectares
(current) to 181,000 hectares (end-state). (New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition
2013, 21)
The composition of the local partners in the New Alliance’s bloc points to the extent to
which there has been a genuine endogenous component to the push toward privatized
and export-driven agriculture. President Banda initiated a policy in 2012 with the goals
of promoting pigeon pea, groundnuts and soya beans for export, and liberalizing the dom-
estic seed market. The firms involved in that initiative overlap with the New Alliance part-
ners, with the further addition of tobacco and processing firms.
There is, indeed, a rich history in which the Malawian government has found its inter-
ests aligned with certain elements of its private sector and foreign interests, above those of
its poorer citizens. Malawi’sfirst president, Hastings Banda, initiated land reform that did
little to address historically inequitable land disparities between peasants living on custom-
ary land, private-sector land holdings and government holdings:
Between 1967 and 1994, for example, more than 1 million hectares of customary land [out of
under 8 million] were lost to private and public land …None of the reforms of 1967 addressed
the legacy of landlessness and land hunger bequeathed by colonial land policy. (Kanyongolo
2005, 124).
It is onto customary and –to a lesser extent –public land that private sector holdings will
expand under the New Alliance.
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Although ostensibly different, the Malawian public and private sectors have increas-
ingly found themselves intertwined. The Cashgate scandal that ended the administration
of President Joyce Banda (unrelated to Hastings Banda) saw the country defrauded of 1
percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) –US$32 million –through government con-
tracts with private-sector firms for which no services were provided, or for which costs were
inflated (Economist 2014).
In defence of the Alliance, one might argue that the push toward export agriculture is one
that generates increased employment, and thereby generates food security. This argument has
Table 2. Declared private-sector commitments to agriculture in Malawi in the New Alliance for
Food Security and Nutrition.
Project
Million
US$
Malawian registered companies
Afri-Nut Co Limited Construct groundnut processing facility 3.9
Agora Limited Construct toor dhal [sic] plant 4.7
Bio Energy Resources Limited Upgrade oil seed processing facility 0.6
Citrefine Plantations Expand oil seed plantation from 5700 ha to 7200 ha 2.5
Dairibord Malawi Private
Limited
Import new breed of cows, increase land for
commercial dairy farming
3.0
Exagris Africa Limited Upgrade irrigation and diversify crops on 5000 ha of
estate land
2.0
Farmers Union of Malawi Build organizational capacity and increase marketing 2.5
Malawi Mangoes Construct processing facility, build outgrower
scheme, increase land under cultivation by 1000 ha
10.0
Mpatsa Farms Limited Introduce irrigation farming for rice, cotton, soya and
maize, build aquaponics capacity
2.0
National Smallholder Farmers’
Association of Malawi
Enlarge seed multiplication and supply programmes
for groundnuts, soya and pigeon pea, develop rice
export markets
3.0
Panthochi Seed Company Expand seed production n/s
Press Agriculture Limited Expand seed production on 50,000 hectares of land,
invest in oilseed processing
5.0
RAB Processors Limited Increase the production of leguminous crops 9.0
Tapika Food Products Expand apiculture projects 1.5
Universal Industries Limited Increase oil seed product and other agro-processing
exports
2.0
International companies
Alliance One Tobacco (Malawi) Increase output of maize, soya bean, flue-cured
tobacco and burley tobacco
n/s
Bunge Promote the growing, the structured marketing and
export of soya beans
n/s
Export Trading Company Establish integrated cotton processing facility 20.0
Illovo Sugar Malawi Limited Increase sugar production on estates 30.0
Limbe Leaf Tobacco Company Expand farmer contracting programme 30.0
Monsanto Malawi Limited Advance existing testing efforts to introduce hybrid
maize and Bt cotton
n/s
Seed Co Malawi Seed processing plant for maize, soybean and beans,
cotton de-linting facility
8.0
Standard Bank Increase commodity and production finance, in
particular to oil seed sector
n/s
Total 139.7
Source: New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (2013,15–23).
Note: n/s-not supplied.
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to contend with the lower labour requirements of export agriculture, the consistently low
wages and poor working conditions of agricultural workers (UN Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food 2013), and the opportunity cost of high-quality land set aside for export
rather than domestic food production. Insofar as changes in Malawi’s agriculture have, argu-
ably, produced welfare benefits, they have come not through export agriculture but through
increased food production (Beck, Mussa, and Pauw 2013; Chirwa and Dorward 2013).
In order for these investments to succeed, however, the government is required to do its
part to provide a business-friendly environment and, in particular, to liberalize land purchas-
ing arrangements (Chinsinga, Chasukwa, and Zuka 2013). Attempts by Parliament to pass a
land bill that might do this foundered in 2012, over the objections of chiefs and civil society.
Chiefs were concerned with the loss of their traditional authority to manage land (Chinele
2014), while civil society groups were concerned about the dynamics encouraged by the
legislation that would disenfranchize women (see Peters and Kambewa 2007 on gendered
land tenure arrangements in central and southern Malawi). The legislation, passed by Parlia-
ment, currently sits with the President, recently elected following highly contentious elections
in May 2014. Land reform has not been named as a high priority by the new government.
In some ways, the New Alliance is not something new; policies which are private-sector
friendly have recent precedent –the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA),
together with USAID, has long been pushing for mechanisms to disseminate agricultural
technologies through the private sector (Holt-Giménez 2008; Holt-Gimenez, Altieri, and
Rosset 2008; Patel, Holt Giménez, and Shattuck 2009). Such dissemination might once
have been the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security (MoAFS). With
decades of donor pressure to reduce government expenditure and domestic choices to
spend the majority of the MoAFS budget on fertilizer subsidies, the extension service
has suffered. In 1996–1998, for instance, government extension services were responsible
for 67 percent of the Ministry of Agriculture’s budget. Today, that figure is 7 percent, and
there is a 60 percent vacancy rate for extension workers (International Food Security
Network 2011). The private sector can handily make the case that the Malawian extension
service is underfunded, and unsuited to the task of disseminating new technologies. Into the
void left by the extension service, USAID and AGRA have supported agrodealership net-
works that have effectively privatized agricultural extension services and displaced services
provided by the state Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (ADMARC),
the public grain marketing board. So successful has the sweep of the public by the private
sector been that one local Monsanto executive credited the entirety of his company’s sales
to small-scale agrodealers (Curtis and Hilary 2012). It is possible to be critical of the cor-
ruption within government, from Cashgate to improprieties at ADMARC (Tambulasi 2009)
to fictional data produced by the Ministry of Agriculture, while thinking that a robust public
institution might function more in the public interest than the private sector is inclined to
behave.
Despite research pointing to the benefits of public extension services over the subsidy of
private sector inputs (Allcott, Lederman, and López 2006; Blanco Armas, Gomez Osorio,
and Moreno-Dodson 2010), the government is being urged to hand its agricultural policy to
the market.
6
One needn’t romanticize the public sector. As Bezner Kerr (2013) notes,
extension services have long been harnessed to overseas purposes. Likewise, abandoning
6
Strictly, this should be ‘the potential for agricultural policy’. While there are nearly three dozen
different agricultural initiatives of various stripes, the country currently lacks a coherent and compre-
hensive agricultural policy.
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of the state as delivery mechanism does not mean an end to the state’s role in the process of
disseminating a particular model of agriculture. The profits of such activity have merely
been privatized. The costs, as we shall see, remain in the public domain. What is new
here are the ways that such activity has restructured state–society relations under capital,
under the aegis of preserving life. In ways that are historically novel, the relations to
means of production are mediated and redistributed because they may lead to better nutri-
tional outcomes.
II. Understanding what role ‘food security and nutrition’play in the New
Alliance
To castigate the New Alliance as having little to do with either food security or nutrition is
to miss the political work that has happened around these terms under neoliberalism. They
function as more than simply an alibi for accumulation by dispossession. The notion of a
historic bloc involves not just a bricolage of comprador interests –domestic and inter-
national –but cultural intervention as an inextricable part of the maintenance and furthering
of hegemony. ‘Development’as project and process has long been part of that vocabulary
of hegemony. Recent work by Scrinis (2013) and Kimura (2013) helps interpret new uses of
the term ‘nutrition’. The clearest articulation of these new uses can be found in the World
Bank’s(1994) publication Enriching lives: overcoming vitamin and mineral malnutrition
in developing countries, which laid the ground for interventions well matched to the
private sector. We explore these ideas at some length in this section because they are
likely to be unfamiliar to many readers, and are only likely to become more significant
in international development discourse. It is worth understanding why, and why it is
dangerous.
Scrinis defines nutritionism as
a reductive focus on the nutrient composition of foods as the means for understanding their
healthfulness, as well as by a reductive interpretation of the role of these nutrients in bodily
health. A key feature of this reductive interpretation of nutrients is that in some instances …
it conceals or overrides concerns with the production and processing quality of a food and
its ingredients. (Scrinis 2013,16–17)
Kimura (2013) advances this by helping to identify how specific nutrients achieve promi-
nence in the minds of policy makers. Describing these ‘charismatic nutrients’, she argues
that ‘the charisma of nutrients cannot be fully captured by their “scientific”values, but
rather, depends on sociopolitical networks built around them’(Kimura 2013, 575–76).
We suggest that a nutritionism focus aligns well with the productivist emphasis in agricul-
ture, which emphasizes food quantity over all other qualities, regardless of concerns about
how food is produced, by whom, and who has access to that food –in other words, the eco-
logical implications and the social–political networks surrounding food and agriculture.
Nutritionism is clear in the case of the Malawian government’s emphasis on iodine
through fortifying salt under the Scaling Up Nutrition initiative.
7
Iodine deficiency is a
7
We cannot address Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) in the depth it deserves in this paper, and is the
subject of future research. We note, however, that SUN is part of the Alliance both bureaucratically
and ideologically. SUN featured in the Lancet special issue and Save the Children report that
accompanied the G8 New Alliance event in London in 2013, at which President Banda committed
Malawi to the New Alliance. It is worth observing that this event, billed as a ‘hunger summit’by
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serious issue. Two billion people are iodine deficient according to the World Health Organ-
ization, and mandatory salt iodization programs have had success in addressing the health
effects of inadequate intake (Zimmermann 2004). Natural sources are associated with
coastal diets –seafood and kelp are naturally high in the mineral, but it is also present in
dairy, eggs and certain legumes (Higdon 2014). There are also high levels of vitamin A
and iron deficiencies, particularly in preschool children of whom 60 percent have subclini-
cal vitamin A deficiencies, and among whom 80 percent suffer anaemia. Severe develop-
mental difficulties associated with iodine deficiencies are around 1 percent (Government
of Malawi 2009, 9).
The Malawian government has not, however, committed to ensuring a diet rich in foods
which address these deficiencies. Such a course might require, according to the United
Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, addressing low peasant access to
land, currently estimated at 0.5 ha/person in a country with rising inequalities (Chinsinga
and Chasukwa 2012; UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 2013). Improving
dietary quality might also involve increasing the minimum wage, currently estimated at
one of the lowest in the world, and improving primary education, to help children and
their caregivers understand basic nutrition science (De Schutter 2013).
Instead, the emphasis of the Malawi government is on fortifying salt with iodine. Other
things being equal, this is more sensible than not iodizing salt, but as a policy, it fails to
address other nutritional deficiencies or the structural issues that lead to high rates of
child mortality and persistent child stunting. The prioritization of iodine deserves an expla-
nation. Part of it can be traced to the model of thinking about nutrition not as a precondition
for a healthy life, but as an investment. A rational calculus of nutrition spending can be
found in the World Bank’s Enriching Lives, in which it observes that ‘deficiencies of
just vitamin A, iodine, and iron …could waste as much as 5 percent of gross domestic
product, but addressing them comprehensively and sustainably would cost less than 0.3
percent of gross domestic product (GDP)’(World Bank 1994, 7). If one is inured to the
instrumentalization necessary to understand nutrition in this way, if one is able to
suspend questions about poverty and poor peoples’access to healthy food on their own
terms, this becomes a powerful call.
In food multinationals, the World Bank found willing responders to such a call, who
heard in the language of investment the opportunity to tweak their products, expand their
ranges and find new customers who had been encouraged by their governments to buy,
not grow, food sprinkled with charismatic nutrients. The Business Alliance for Food For-
tification (BAFF) was convened by the World Bank and the Global Alliance for Improved
Nutrition. Over 150 companies attended, and at their first meeting in China in 2005, ‘Coca-
Cola, Danone and Unilever agreed to become the first co-chairs of the BAFF’(BAFF 2014,
2). Members of the private sector saw themselves as well positioned to contribute to the
effort to eradicate malnutrition. ‘Companies already own the right technology to make a
difference as well as the distribution channels and communication networks’, BAFF
explained (2014, 1).
The economic calculus presented to the business community also possessed a logic irre-
sistible to governments. Again, the language of investment resonated particularly with those
governments struggling with high levels of debt, and with scarce resources for a more
the British government, went by a slightly different name in its official literature. It was entitled
‘Nutrition for growth: beating hunger through business and science’(Gillespie et al. 2013; Nabarro
2013; Ruel and Alderman 2013; Save the Children 2013).
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comprehensive nutrition policy. Fifteen years later, in the Malawian government’s National
Nutrition Policy and Strategic Plan (2007–2011), the government used the language of
investment, losses and economic returns to frame their nutritional intervention:
In Malawi, it is estimated that due to mental impairment caused by iodine deficiency, the
present value of lost future wages over ten years (2006–2015) could amount to US$71
million. Reduced physical capacity in stunted adults would contribute to a loss of future econ-
omic production of US$207 million for every 1% reduction in height is equivalent to 1.3% loss
in productivity (in present value terms)...The translation is that for every US$1 Malawi invests
in nutrition, there is a US$5.3 gain in productivity and therefore Malawi would gain US$1.7
billion in the same 10 years period (2006–2015). (Government of Malawi 2009, 12 emphasis
in original)
Salt iodization is a great return on investment. As Kimura observes,
The procurement and distribution of supplements requires too many government resources or
those of international organizations, and the execution is dependent on their capacity and com-
mitment. In contrast, the argument goes, fortification is much more ‘efficient’because it needs
less government involvement. Fortification is also an ideal way to involve the private sector in
the currently celebrated notion of ‘public-private partnership’. (Kimura 2013, 1247–1252)
Fortification has long been celebrated in nutrition, in part because of its simplicity. No
change in distribution or education is required. Since people already consume sugar and
salt, fortification is a simple way to increase micronutrient intake, as long as they can
afford these foodstuffs. Lest it bear restatement, this isn’t to argue that iodine deficiencies
ought to be tolerated. Chronic iodine deficiency can lead to reduced mental facility, and
pregnant women, in particular, need increased iodine (Zimmermann 2012). Such fortifica-
tion, however, gilds a shift towards a diet higher in salt, fat and sugar that has led in the
Global North (and increasingly in the Global South) to severe chronic health issues
(Patel 2007; Guthman 2011). Further, following Kimura, the discourse of investment and
return under nutritionism ‘critically shifts who can speak authoritatively about the food
problem and who is listened to’(Kimura 2013, 254–55). Further, it ‘creates a particular visi-
bility for women –but not necessarily in a way that reduces their oppression and margin-
ality. Discourses of nutritionism may highlight women’s plight as the victims of
micronutrient deficiencies, but only as biologically programmed ones’(Kimura 2013,
320–22). Little attention is paid to the broader structural factors, such as poverty, low edu-
cation, low wages or limited landholdings, that lead to undernutrition; instead, the medicine
is just a spoonful of fortified sugar. In other words, rather than a central commitment to era-
dicate poverty, the covering logic of nutritionism commits to making exploitation surviva-
ble. With fortified flour, the exploited can carry on (LaGrone et al. 2012). This is the era of
poverty with added vitamins.
This point brings us to the second intervention that the Malawian government hopes to
achieve under its New Alliance commitments: the extension of maternity leave from eight
weeks to an as-yet unspecified higher number, in order to increase the period of exclusive
breast-feeding closer to the recommended six-month minimum. Yet, out of a total work-
force of over 6 million, less than half a million work in formal-sector jobs covered by mater-
nity leave, so only 10 percent of working women would be affected (ILO 2011).
The intervention flags ways in which the New Alliance is both a bourgeois project –and
progressive for middle class women in the workplace –and yet careless toward the class
condition of the majority of Malawi’s reproductive labour, and women’s labour in
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particular. It is a way for the state to answer the question ‘how can women be encouraged to
breastfeed?’, yet to answer with bourgeois tools, unable and unwilling to do more than
extend the time allotted by formal labour for reproductive labour. Nutritionism’s emergence
through the private sector helps explain the ways that the New Alliance can offer itself as a
sincere attempt to combat malnutrition, at the same time as building public–private partner-
ships in other parts of value chains (McMichael 2013). This is how the arrival of foreign
multinationals in search of resources for low-cost agro-export and for new customers
(for fertilizer and fortified foods, for example) becomes compatible with the sainted goal
of ending hunger.
We have intentionally taken longer in this section to explore these issues, not only
because of their novelty but also to lay a foundation for exploring exactly how, through
the development of new contradictions of class, gender and traditional relations, the New
Alliance reconfigures a historic bloc. What is suppressed through this hegemony is the
possibility of alternative ways of addressing hunger. The eradication of poverty (Atinmo
et al. 2009), the provision of livelihood support and opportunity (Devereux et al. 2006),
the funding of basic services in order to provide support to mothers (Pandolfelli,
Shandra, and Tyagi 2014)–all of these are policy goals undermined by the emphasis on
private-sector solutions to public problems. Struggles against neoliberalism in Malawi,
whether around land (Kanyongolo 2005), seeds (Bezner Kerr 2013) or healthcare
(Bezner Kerr and Mkandawire 2012), are ongoing and important. We want, however, to
turn to a project that looks at an important –and often overlooked –site of resistance to
the formation of the hegemonic bloc: the household.
As Bezner Kerr and Mkandawire (2012) note, neoliberalism involves the presupposi-
tion of problematic ‘modern’gender roles, particularly around the household. There are
ways in which women are instrumentalized in dominant development practices and policies
that militate against radical approaches to the creation of a diverse diet, ending poverty,
women’s empowerment, agroecological resilience and gender transformation. We turn
now to such an example, to suggest ways that the New Alliance’s modernity is being con-
tested (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). It is a project that is in no way comparable to the
scale of the New Alliance. It currently involves only about 10,000 farmers in Malawi –a
small fraction of the millions in the country. Nonetheless, we offer it as a counterexample
to the New Alliance not only because it has already been able to accomplish what the New
Alliance only aspires to, but because it takes seriously a politics that stands opposed to
nutritionism, to technocratic rule, to the discounting of women’s knowledge or peer-to-
peer networks, to the questioning of long-held hierarchies of power, a politics in which
ideas of nutrition matter, but are subordinate to ideas of equality and democracy.
III. How to take food security and nutrition seriously –Recipe Days in Northern
Malawi
That 60 percent of undernourished people are women or girls is widely accepted (WFP
2009; Patel 2012). It has long been understood that an unequal division of labour within
the home contributes to these outcomes (Kabeer 1994), even though the precise mechan-
isms through which these operate are less well understood (Cafiero 2012).
The household is a space in which gender relations are produced and reproduced
(Gibson-Graham 1996), in which labour is divided daily, in which the historical inequities
in gender relations are made contemporary. Within the household, a central site of these
performances is the kitchen, and the reproductive labour of preparing, cooking, serving
and cleaning around mealtimes. Inequities in the division of labour –reproductive and
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otherwise –extend beyond the household. In Malawi, women are actively involved in agri-
cultural work. A recent national survey indicated that women performed agricultural labour
on 94 percent of all plots, while men undertook similar agricultural labour on 82 percent of
all plots (NSO 2012). While the same survey did not report on household labour, small-
scale studies indicate that women do the vast majority of household tasks, such as
cooking, water collection and child care (Bezner Kerr 2005). The inequity around this div-
ision of labour is further compounded by the subsequent outcomes in nutrition. Care has
been shown to be a crucial aspect of child nutritional outcomes (Ruel et al. 1999), and
Malawi has had persistent high rates of child stunting, currently estimated at 48 percent
nationally (NSO 2012).
A recent UN Human Development Report for Africa looks at resource control, and
women’s ownership of land in particular, as a potential locus for change (UNDP 2012).
Yet the ability to access land is not the primary issue for women in northern Malawi.
Access to land is through the patriarchal institution of village chiefs, rather than through
the market. For women who are residents in good standing of a particular village, the gen-
erally observed rule is that a wife will farm her husband’s land. Widowed or divorced
women (about 20 percent of Northern households) more often gain access to farmland
through male kin, such as fathers or brothers (Bezner Kerr 2005; NSO 2012).
An estimated 20 to 40 percent of households find themselves exhausting their food
supplies before the harvest comes in. When this happens, casual labour in other peoples’
fields–ganyu –is a survival strategy (NSO 2012). Female-headed households are more
likely to be dependent on ganyu to survive than male-headed households (Bezner Kerr
2005; Dimova et al. forthcoming). By contrast, more equality in the home, observe
Lemke et al. (2003) in a rare and important examination of intra-household inequality,
results in increased food security.
The Ekwendeni region of northern Malawi is characterized by high levels of gender
inequality within food insecure families. In-depth interviews carried out in 1997 revealed
stories of domestic violence, lack of control over household resources, heavy workloads,
excessive alcohol use by husbands and hunger (Bezner Kerr 2005). At the same time,
both women and men talked about the rising cost of fertilizer and the limited options avail-
able to farmers to improve their crop production.
The Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC) project began in 2000 as a response
to these findings, a pilot project of Ekwendeni Hospital to test different sustainable agricul-
tural techniques as a means to improve food security and, ultimately, child nutrition (Bezner
Kerr and Chirwa 2004). Using a farmer participatory research approach, the project initially
began in seven villages, in which 30 members of a ‘Farmer Research Team’were selected
by their communities.
The Farmer Research Team learned different ways that leguminous plant options, such
as pigeon pea and groundnut, could be grown to both improve their soils and provide
alternative nutritious food sources for their families.
8
The farmers then tested these
options on their own small experimental plots, taught fellow villagers interested in trying
the legume options and, alongside hospital staff and outside researchers, measured the
8
While pigeon pea and groundnut have both been grown in Malawi for many hundreds of years, the
‘doubled-up’legume system involves intercropping two or more legumes together and then incorpor-
ating the legume residue to improve soil fertility for the next growing season. This system is a signifi-
cant change from the normal practices of burning crop residue or intercropping legume plants within a
maize field (Bezner Kerr et al. 2007).
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impact of these new agricultural practices on their food security and nutrition. Other vil-
lages approached the hospital requesting access to the legumes and techniques associated
with them. Over time, thousands of farmers began to experiment with different legume
options and expand the size of their legume fields (Bezner Kerr et al. 2007).
Farmers in Malawi have long experimented with new crops. As Carr notes:
Farmers …now supplement their diet with beans and pigeon peas from India, tomatoes and
avocados from the Americas, rape from Europe, mangos, paw paws and guavas from Asia,
the list goes on and on. It is in fact difficult today to find farmers who are growing any indi-
genous plants and the countryside is dominated by crops which were introduced from other
continents in comparatively recent times. This completely undermines the assumption, so
widely proclaimed, that Malawian smallholders are extremely conservative in both their
farming and eating habits. In reality they have welcomed and adopted a whole range of new
crops and exotic foods without any outside pressure. (Carr 2004, 13)
The SFHC project built on this willingness to experiment with a social system for transmit-
ting and sharing knowledge equitably and freely. In creating spaces and processes in which
women and men might consider one another equal in skill, entitlement to speak and as
bearers of knowledge, something new emerged. While gender had been a consideration
by project staff from the start of the project, a participatory workshop held in 2003
proved a pivotal moment for raising key gender dynamics that worked against improved
household food security and child nutrition. The workshop included various groups from
communities, both older and younger women, highly food-insecure farmers and Farmer
Research Team members as well as hospital staff, the second author and other researchers.
Across a range of presentations –ranging from factual to dramatic in form –farmer par-
ticipants highlighted the challenges faced in their homes. Women complained that in some
cases, the new cropping patterns resulted in an increased workload. Increased food avail-
ability of nutritious crops such as groundnuts, pigeon pea and soya beans did not necess-
arily result in improved nutritional benefits. Women reported that men would often take
these crops, sell them, and use the revenue to purchase alcohol, or other uses not of
benefit to the household.
Active discussions at that workshop led to the formation of a ‘Nutrition Research Team’
of 35 farmers, both men and women, to address issues raised in the workshop. This team
was mandated to focus on four major nutrition themes identified through previous research
by the project: exclusive breastfeeding, dietary diversification, frequent feeding of young
children, and ‘family cooperation’, which included addressing unequal gender relations.
Initially, each village team conducted home visits to families who had highly malnourished
children. These home visits included demonstrations of recipes, and the presentation of
ideas about how their children’s diet might improve. In a meeting 2 years later, however,
the team admitted that often men did not participate in these visits, and that participants
had reported limited benefits from the home visits.
The idea of ‘Recipe Days’emerged as an iterative improvement to the experiences of
the home visits. Discussions between project staff, researchers and the Farmer Research
Team about how to address child malnutrition, food insecurity and gender inequality –par-
ticularly around the division of household labour and decision-making –suggested that a
one-on-one didactic approach hadn’t been successful, and that a more collective, public
and enjoyable approach might work better. Recipe Days were born out of this impetus.
The first Recipe Day was a somewhat modest affair. About 20 people attended, of
whom a handful were men, mainly members of the Farmer Research Team. The women
did the majority of the cooking and took charge of explaining recipes. Men’s participation
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was intermittent and awkward, uncomfortable in their transgressing a gender role as they
pounded soya, sieved flour and stirred various dishes (Figure 2). A small number of
recipes were made and then displayed and discussed by the participants. A week later, a
technical workshop was held to discuss nutrition education, during which there was a brain-
storming session about the way forward. Village teams decided to have community meet-
ings with both men and women present, where different dishes would be prepared,
discussed and then eaten, and gender issues would be raised. This approach would
address questions of nutrition, provide a public and collective forum for the discussion
of gender –and make it possible to have in public the kinds of discussion around the dis-
tribution of household work that had remained a private domestic matter.
Recipe Days continued, characterized by collective cooking, sharing of recipes, eating
and discussion. At first they were organized by the Nutrition Research Team and then, after
this team had dissolved in 2005, they were organized by staff and the Farmer Research
Team. Over time, the size, participation by men and experience of Recipe Days changed.
More and more men began to attend, often making up half of the participants. Their
active participation in pounding, cooking and then presenting the dishes to the group
also became an increasingly prominent feature of these events. The experiences became
livelier, with more joking, laughter and tasting the food during cooking (Figure 3).
In-depth interviews about the project impact revealed that the recipes learned during the
Recipe Days, and the shared experience of cooking together, were deeply appreciated by
participating farmers:
Whenever our children were sick or malnourished we would take them to the hospital where
they were receiving likuni phala [soy and maize flour to make porridge]; I did not know it was
the same soya which we grow or we can grow and harvest ourselves. The new way of cooking
which we have learnt from SFHC has made our families so special because our children feel as
if we have just ordered the food from somewhere because of the way the food tastes and looks
and so good.
(Middle-aged man, in-depth evaluation interview 18, 2009)
[Have you noticed any change in gender relations in your home since joining the project?]
They’ve changed so much. Like now I’m here at the clinic, maybe my wife is here at the
Figure 2. Man pounding soya during Recipe Day, 13 August 2003.
Source: Rachel Bezner Kerr.
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garden, so when I go home, I cannot sit and wait for her. I can prepare a meal, eat my share, and
when she gets back she can eat. I cook nice meals! My last-born son is 15 years, he also cooks
and helps at home.
Before the project I’d say ‘I want you to go the wells and draw three buckets of water, and then
do this and this.’I was in charge. I appreciate that life has changed, it is no longer what it was in
the past. God has also helped. Not many people can know why someone would change like
this. Even my son is happy.
It is not like a one man’s show in my family. Sometimes my wife says ‘I’m not feeling well’,
maybe I do heavier jobs, and she does lighter jobs.
(In-depth interview 3, participating male farmer who participated in Recipe Days, 2009)
The project has grown from a handful of farmers to hundreds and now thousands in the
region experimenting with different sustainable agricultural techniques (Bezner Kerr et al.
2012). Alongside the agricultural experimentation has been active organizing around
recipes and nutrition education. In 2012, there were about 10 Recipe Days organized,
some by the project staff and some by community members, with a range of between 25
and 100 adults in attendance at any Recipe Day, alongside often an equal or greater
number of children. Over 1000 men and women have attended Recipe Days in the region
in the past 3 years (SFHC 2012). Some of the Recipe Days have a specific‘theme’such
as sharing recipes for a particular crop, or recipes that are useful during the period of food
shortages. Others are organized to welcome visitors and showcase the work that farmers
have achieved. In 48 in-depth evaluation interviews conducted in 2012 about the project,
in which people were asked what significant changes they had experienced after joining
the project, learning new recipes was a common theme, and, interestingly, over three quar-
ters of those interviewed talked about having a more equitable division of labour and
decision-making in their households. As one 31-year-old woman noted, when asked if
there had been any significant changes in her household since she joined the project:
Sharing of household resources, decision-making: we share in every work, and we women even
have time to rest. Before I had to work all day, there was no time for me to rest. Even decisions
are [now] made by the two of us. (Evaluation interview 48, October 2012)
Figure 3. Paul Nkhonjera cooking with other farmers looking on, 8 August 2009.
Source: Rachel Bezner Kerr.
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Others talked specifically about the changes in cooking that they experienced as a result of
the project, such as this young woman:
Like in food preparation my husband can cook nsima [maize porridge] for the children, when
am away, and when I cook nsima he assists with relish preparation and cooking though many
laugh at him. My husband can do anything I can do for the child, [like] feeding, washing
clothes. People feel I have given him ‘love’medicine. We also make decisions together.
(Evaluation interview 5, with similar comments made by 7, 8 and 34, October 2012)
Men also talked about the transformations wrought in them since joining the project, at
times waxing poetic about these changes during the interview in front of male neighbours
and kin. As one older man insisted:
Nowadays I can help my wife, although at first most of the work was done by her. I can prepare
food when my wife is busy with other household work, I even prepare the bed when my wife is
cooking. (Evaluation interview 13, October 2012)
To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one isn’t born part of a household, one becomes one. At
Recipe Days, women and men are offered the opportunity to perform gender relations dif-
ferently. Women teach men to cook for the household (as opposed to simply for themselves,
which they may already know to do if involved in labour away from their homes), exchan-
ging nutritious recipes with other households. Recipe Days provide a space where men can
feel safe and encouraged in new performances of ‘counter-hegemonic masculinity’
(Connell 1995), and where women can subvert gender roles and ‘undo gender’with a
freedom hard to find in other spaces (Butler 2004). The creation of these spaces makes it
easier for gender transformation to occur. These transformations in turn lead to improve-
ments in food security within the household. Recipe Days aren’t magic, of course. They
require extensive follow-up by community organizers in order for the lessons to be incor-
porated into everyday practice. The lessons don’t always stick. The responses from the
small-scale survey show a failure rate of around 25 percent, and the efficacy of the pro-
gramme is currently the subject of ongoing statistically robust work.
We are also critical of those who are included and left out of these interventions. The
landholding arrangements where SFHC takes place fall under traditional law. They
happen with the permission of the village headman. His patriarchal authority is not the
subject of debate or discussion. In addition, there are examples where families –usually
migrants from southern Malawi looking for land –have joined the SFHC programme,
improved the soil using agroecological methods and then have that land reclaimed by
the village headman. In other cases, widows who have improved the land have it seized
by their husband’s family. We recognize the many layered inequalities, built on histories
of dispossession and patriarchy, that mean only some peasant farmers benefit from this
intervention.
We have tried in this discussion to emphasize the experience of the participants them-
selves in the Recipe Days, because it is their participation –and the subsequent follow-up
by community organizers in maintaining the transformation of relations–that has mattered
to them. Such an emphasis should not preclude, however, the importance of the intervention
as a policy decision. This is a site of struggle that takes nutrition seriously, without devol-
ving into nutritionism. Research carried out over a 7-year period demonstrated that the
intervention made a significant difference in child stunting in the area. Over 3500 children
had their height and weight measured before and after their household joined the project.
Children in families that were participating actively in the project had improved child
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growth compared to families that were not in the project (Bezner Kerr, Berti, and Shumba
2010;Figure 4). Malnutrition rates have declined substantially in the region, to the extent
that the Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre at Ekwendeni Hospital has closed, due to a lack of
acute cases. While the Hospital’s active Primary Health Care programme (including anti-
malaria, maternal and child health and AIDS programmes) is likely responsible for a fair
share of this decline, the SFHC project has also contributed to this dramatic shift in a
little more than a decade (Bezner Kerr, Berti, and Shumba 2010).
IV. Dividends from comparing the New Alliance with Recipe Days
The innovations produced through processes that spawned Recipe Days show that insofar
as they found the autonomy to research, farm, invest and distribute as they’d like, the par-
ticipants in the SFHC project were able to be far more successful than the New Alliance
might be (Van der Ploeg 2008). A number of differences suggest themselves from the com-
parison of the New Alliance and the SFHC project.
Perhaps most important is the issue of who gets to think (Pithouse 2006; Comaroff and
Comaroff 2011; Neocosmos forthcoming). That Recipe Days emerged from a process of
farmer research, with no specific individual credited with the idea, is in marked contrast
to the disempowering tropes of the New Alliance, which constructs the hungry as recipients
–and buyers –of better food, but never as agents empowered to think through the problems
and constraints around malnutrition.
Figure 4. Change in Ekwendeni children’s weight (under the age of 3 years) between 2004 and 2007
by village involvement in the intervention (t= 0 at month in which village joined intervention). Vil-
lages are grouped according to the year in which they became control and intervention villages. The
survey group effect was significant (P= 0.04). Significant differences were observed within groups (P
< 0.05): (i) control year x –intervention year 2001, 1st survey < 3rd, 4th and 8th, 2nd survey < 3rd, 4th
and 7th, 3rd survey < 5th, 6th and 7th, 4th survey < 7th, 5th survey < 7th, 7th survey < 8th; (ii) control
year 2001 –intervention year 2002, 1st survey > 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2nd survey > 3rd, 3rd survey < 4th
and 5th; (iii) control year 2001–intervention year 2003, 1st survey < 4th, 2nd survey < 7th, 3rd survey
< 8th, 4th survey < 7th, 5th and 6th surveys < 7th. Source: Bezner Kerr, Berti, and Shumba (2010).
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Herein lies another difference between the New Alliance and the SFHC project –a taste
for democratic politics. Under the New Alliance, the proper job of politics is to create and
police a business-friendly climate, after which the efficiencies of the private sector, and the
laser-like focus of science, will prioritise and address malnutrition, deficiency by
deficiency. This biopolitical management of hunger seems to overwhelm the notion of
using ‘nutrition’in ways other than those conforming to the New Alliance’s mode of gov-
ernance. It is in this sense that the New Alliance’s concern with nutrition places it in a tra-
jectory of a Long Green Revolution (Patel 2013).
Yet in the SFHC project, an understanding of nutrition that heeds concerns of power
and labour –particularly reproductive labour –guides a politics that pays little heed to
the liberal distinctions of public and private sectors, or public and domestic space. Ques-
tions of distribution and inequality are inherently political. In addressing malnutrition,
they cannot be postponed. The farmers involved in the SFHC project understand the pol-
itical nature of hunger, and have created spaces where political work, at least at the local
and household level, happens. Recipe Days are just one dimension of this work. The use
of agroecological methods to improve soil fertility and food security is another (Msachi
et al. 2009).
By contrasting the New Alliance to Recipe Days, we argue that the same problem –of
households not having enough food, and children’s bodies being deprived of the things they
need to survive –is being addressed very differently and, in the case of Recipe Days, with
success. The reconfiguration of the household, in counter-hegemonic ways, is an important
pointer to ways in which prevailing hegemony can be countered. Of course, without further
struggle against other forces within the historic bloc –international, domestic and tra-
ditional –little may change. The women and men who make Recipe Days happen do
not do so in explicit opposition to the New Alliance. Yet in their addressing of gender,
in their reconfiguration of productive and reproductive labour responsibilities and in the
organizing that precedes and follows these events, Recipe Days reveal an understanding
about the causes and responses to infant malnutrition that the New Alliance cannot –by
its own constraints –address. This approach helps us explain why the New Alliance is actu-
ally about food security and nutrition. But it also points to the possibilities of different kinds
of subjectivity than those on which the New Alliance depends. In Ekwendeni, people aren’t
consumers or passive recipients. They are architects, constrained but inventive, of new
ways of being in the world –and agents, above all, of their own freedom. The New Alliance
offers many things, but it can never offer that.
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Raj Patel is a research professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University
of Texas at Austin, and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes Uni-
versity (UHURU), Grahamstown, South Africa. He is a fellow at The Institute for Food and Devel-
opment Policy, also known as Food First. In addition to his scholarly work he has written for The
Guardian, the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others. His first book was
Stuffed and starved: the hidden battle for the world food system and his latest is The value of
nothing:how to reshape market society and redefine democracy. He is currently working on a docu-
mentary project about the global food system, with director Steve James. Corresponding author.
Email: rajpatel@utexas.edu
Rachel Bezner Kerr is an associate professor in the Department of Development Sociology at
Cornell University. Her research interests converge on the broad themes of sustainable agriculture,
food security, health, nutrition and social inequalities, with a primary focus in southern Africa, and
foci on (1) historical, political and social roots of the food system in northern Malawi, (2) sustainable
agriculture, food security and social processes in rural Africa, (3) social relations linked to health and
nutritional outcomes and (4) local knowledge and climate change adaptation.
Lizzie Shumba is the project coordinator of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project, which
she joined in 2003. Lizzie holds a diploma in nutrition from the Natural Resources College in
Lilongwe, and she is completing her BSc in rural extension and nutrition at the Lilongwe University
of Agriculture and Natural Resources. She looks forward to sharing what she learns with her col-
leagues when she returns to Ekwendeni.
Laifolo Dakishoni,or‘Dak’as he is commonly called, is an accountant and acting project coordinator
at the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project (SFHC), and is currently the principal investi-
gator and enterprise coordinator of the Malawi Farmer to Farmer Agroecology Project. He began
with SFHC in November 2001, after study at the Malawi College of Accounting, where he earned
a diploma in accounting, and where he continues his studies in chartered accountancy. Since 2001,
he has enjoyed being part of the project’s evolution, and has been greatly motivated by the
farmers’eagerness to learn and try new things.
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