MALAWI: Tom Kitt saw at first hand the benefits of Irish aid in the wetlands around Kanengo, where the local community has been helped to solve its own problems, writes Frank McDonald.
Agnes Kanthunkako is justifiably proud of what her hunger committee has achieved in the wetlands around Kanengo, 10 kilometres from here. For the corn is as high as an elephant's eye and it's not even the growing season in Malawi.
Areas once covered in reeds are being made to bloom with maize to feed 3,500 families in the area at a time when they will most need it, when their supplies run out in November.
It is just one of 250 food security projects being funded by Ireland Aid.
The field of ripening corn was planted last April and will soon be ready for harvesting. In another newly created field, men from the local villages were taking turns yesterday to operate a treadle pump while women did the back-breaking work of tilling with their African hoes.
Dressed in her Sunday best, Ms Kanthunkako showed the results to the Minister of State for Overseas Development and Human Rights, Mr Tom Kitt, whose Department is paying for seeds, fertiliser, equipment and some field labour through Concern, the Irish relief agency.
The aim is to propagate a "two-crop approach" throughout Malawi. Previously, farmers only planted maize in the rainy season, ignoring the potential of wetlands to produce crops at other times of the year. Now, they are becoming fields of dreams for hungry people.
Dublin-born Anne Conroy, who has been working as a special adviser to the government of Malawi for the past 10 years, conceded that the wetlands may have had some value for wild birds. But the need for food is so pressing they had to be turned over to agriculture.
The Kanengo hunger committee had to negotiate with local tribal chiefs to get access to the formerly fallow land for this community-based self-help scheme. The chiefs could hardly have said no, not least because of their traditional obligations to the wider community.
There was hunger in Kanengo "until Concern came to our rescue", Ms Kanthunkako said yesterday.
First, food was distributed to the most needy people in the area and then the agency got involved in "helping us to solve the problem for ourselves".
Over 1,000 families were given free maize seed, with the right to plant a quarter-acre each - sufficient to produce enough food to last a couple of months. Some of them are also planting cassava, sweet potato, rapeseed, onion and tomato for sale on the open market.
This was "grassroots democracy at work", said Ms Conroy as she surveyed the work in progress. Women with babies on their backs were using Irish-funded watering cans to irrigate newly planted beds of maize, watched by older children sitting at the edge of a field.
In another field, a woman with eight children of her own and five adopted orphans had dug two wells.
Yesterday, her young teenage sons were hoeing the rich soil for planting while, in the distance, other villagers could be heard wailing intensely at the funeral of an elder.
Members of the Kanengo hunger committee receive no salaries or benefits for their work.
"All we are doing is trying to make a difference to the lives of the people," Agnes Kanthunkako told The Irish Times