There is an extreme lack of finance in the region, and for a land strapped farmer acquiring a loan is a near impossibility. It's hard to justify an investment f

There is an extreme lack of finance in the region, and for a land strapped farmer acquiring a loan is a near impossibility. It's hard to justify an investment for what is essentially subsistence farming, with a little surplus in good seasons (perhaps!). Undoubtedly some soils were taxes beyond what they could handle, but consider the alternative: slash and burn agriculture, or a steady crop rotation (hardly tenable when you need a crop this year, or your population dies!) I have to say, however, I disagree with the headline. There are economists who oppose agricultural subsidies in favor of globalization, and those who support them. In the case of Malawi and other, tiny nations, it is clear enough to most economists, even those formerly of the World Bank (say, Joseph Stiglitz) that the dangers of an economy reliant on cash crops subject to rapid price fluctuations are too dire. One plague, one drought, one bad season, and you're wiped out, and need to accept punitive terms from international lending agencies just to feed the populace. It's not like there was a consensus of experts the president was disregarding. Incidentally, one of the reasons, insufficiently mentioned, I believe, that subsistence agriculture can make sense even in semi-arid countries, is that it has a distribution network built in. Often times there is significant corruption in the distribution channels, other times they are simply disrupted by political upheaval, other times still the infrastructure simply isn't there, or is otherwise quite costly. The distribution of inorganic fertilizer, by contrast, is substantially easier, and it is much less vulnerable to political disruption. You need to move less of it, the demand is substantially less fixed (more is better, but less won't kill you) and less immediate (rebels and bandits can steal food and jack up prices -- not so much with fertilizer), and the economic benefit has much longer to reach everyone (a crop lasts longer than any given shipment of food).