Post-Colonial Agriculture Policy and Agrarian Change in Malawi, 1964–1979

What is it about?

This paper unpacks the colonial and the post-colonial motivation for change in agricultural policy. It discusses the path dependent nature of these policies from the colonial agricultural related policies that favoured white settlers to those developed in the post-colonial period that attempted to incorporate the African farmers into the capitalist farming orientation. As this paper shall note, these post-colonial changes in agricultural policy, though were regarded as being progressive, they did not bring any radical change in how the African farmer viewed agriculture in general as it was still centred at the heart of family relations and set up. The paper has four parts. Firstly it discusses the colonial legacy in agriculture and how the colonial policies influenced the orientation of the agriculture policies in the post-colonial period. Secondly, it introduces the post-colonial agriculture narrative. It explains the several development initiatives and strategies of the post-colonial government and agriculture’s position in these documents. Thirdly it gives an overview of the major development initiatives that post-colonial government came up with in an attempt to develop the smallholder sector. The fourthly, it gives an outline of how the post-colonial institutions like the ADMARC developed the estates’ sector at the expense of the smallholder sector through surplus extraction and also through unfair pricing and taxation.

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