ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, many smallholder farmers in Malawi have struggled with chronic food shortages on an annual basis. Agricultural solutions to food insecurity are contested, however, through political and scientifi c debates that give insight into dimensions of power and knowledge in the current global order. Th is paper analyzes two agricultural complexes,1 each of which privileges a certain set of practices, and provides a particular narrative, or story, about the problem and solution to agriculture and food security in Malawi.2 Th ese contrasting stories draw attention to the ways in which certain agricultural methods and approaches are seen to fall within or outside the realm of possibility. A dominant theme in the fi rst agricultural complex is that increased food insecurity, land degradation and depeasantization is occurring on a rapid scale in Malawi and throughout Africa, with the proposed development solution to focus technological resources on smallholder farmers with access to more land, capital, and labor. Th e second agricultural complex posits that indigenous farming methods have been eroded by colonial and post-colonial policies and that the “freedom” of democracy and capitalism in the current neo-liberal era has not (and will not) result in freedom from hunger. Competing visions of agriculture and food security in Malawi then frame two contrasting agricultural complexes; competing narratives tell the story of each set of practices. While the dominant narrative assumes an inevitable disappearance of the peasantry, dissolved into a minority class of entrepreneurial farmers using commercial inputs, the alternative farmer narrative suggests that returning to indigenous farming practices, along with social relations, would improve
food security. Since they are competing visions, each considers the other an obstacle to its full implementation, although these ideas are at times intertwined.
