Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the efforts the state and its agencies have made to transform the manner in which Africans produced and consumed their foods in Malawi. Framed within the political economy context, it advocates for adaptive learning by the state to achieve food security among rural farmers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the efforts the state and its agencies have made to transform the manner in which Africans produced and consumed their foods in Malawi. It observes that, despite possessing political and economic power, the state, in its various forms, has not always been all-powerful or monolithic in executing its food and nutrition interventions in the country. It has faced challenges from the rural farmers who constantly resist and negotiate the terms of their participation. Far from being passive victims of state machination; the rural farmers have sought to not only claim but also cultivate their space within state hegemony. This dialectical relation accounted for the failure of the state food interventions. In making this argument, the paper sheds new light to political economy which considers conflict of interests as the major bottleneck to the development outcomes of well-intended projects. Conflict of interests is not always an enemy of development, but sometimes it constitutes the propelling force for achieving development goals. However, instead of developing adaptive learning towards the competitive and conflicting relations, the Malawi state insisted on its new principles independent of the existing history and the local context. The future of food security shall, therefore, depend on the ability of the state to adapt new ideas to prevailing knowledge of the rural farmers.