In countries around the world families are struggling to put food on the table this evening, and many will fail.  Thankfully 45 year old Lydia Harry, a mother-of-six from Lomoliwa village in the Phalomba district of southern Malawi, is not one of them.
Lydia, who is head of her household, is one of the poorest villagers in a poor rural district of one of the poorest countries in the world.
She has had one of the best harvests for years, despite poor climatic conditions.  Lydia explained that in previous years she had harvested only two bags of the staple crop maize. Yet this year she has already sold five bags.
When I asked how many she had left for her own family she said she wasn’t sure.  She took me by the arm to her maize store.  The store, although relatively small, was full to bursting with unbagged maize.

Lydia is not alone in Malawi.  It isn’t just her family which is bucking the global food crisis, but many of her neighbours and the country as a whole.
Only a few years ago the situation was very different, with many relying on emergency food distributions from the WFP or Oxfam as drought resulted in a national food crisis.  Yet the government’s response has been to put in place an invaluable support package for millions of the country’s poor farmers.
This support focused on subsidised fertiliser among other measures.  With fertiliser costing 5,000 Malawian kwacha a bag (about£18), it is well out of the price range of most farmers in a country where almost 80% of people live on less than 50 pence a day.
The government subsidy has vastly reduced the price, allowing farmers to invest in their land and gain a better harvest.  This has provided enough food for their families and often, like Lydia, some left over to sell.  In her case, she had used the extra funds to meet the costs of sending her children to school; a lasting legacy of a good harvest.
 Idrissa Mwale, a principal economist at the Ministry of Agriculture and a key architect of the agricultural inputs scheme, explained how more that two million households have benefited.  Although problems remain, he said, the vast majority of households have access to food from their own production.  Discussing the global food crisis and Malawi’s response, he said  “I would encourage countries to invest in this sort of programme.”
(Malcolm Fleming, Oxfam Scotland writing in the Sunday Herald 15 June 2008)