"Do As I Say, Not As I Do" is again a failure

The New York Times has up an amazing story of an African country which turned itself from a net beggar to a net exporter of food by doing one simple thing. They defied Western "experts" and instituted a fertilizer subsidy program which mimicked those in place in the USA and Britain. Typically, the World Bank refuses to grant loans to countries which subsidize fertilizer, so most nations try to make due with depleted soil and wind up starving.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly...In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

Here is proof yet again that the best way to succeed is to do what is proven to work, and not what bureaucrats theorize in office buildings. Of course, we still need to see what happens long-term, but for the moment the people of Malawi is fed and even able to bring in some capital by exporting food.