The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is blaming a deadly food crisis in Malawi on bad weather, poor crops and mismanagement, dismissing claims that its policies contributed to hundreds of deaths in the southern African nation.

ActionAid, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) with offices in the southern African country, has accused the IMF of playing a role in hundreds of famine-related deaths in Malawi, one of Africa's poorest nations.

But in a statement released late Monday, the IMF said, "The causes of food shortages in Malawi are complex, also including lapses in the government's early warning systems, distortions in domestic markets, and mismanagement of food reserves."

"Adverse weather has contributed to recent crop failures and food shortages in a number of countries in southern Africa, including Malawi," it added.

The new statement marks a departure from the Fund's original position: that it based its advice to sell part of the country's maize reserves and make effective use of the rest on faulty information supplied by Malawian authorities and the European Commission.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has predicted that 300,000 people could die in Southern Africa, including Malawi, over the next six months because of drought and severe food shortages.

ActionAid says the IMF is responsible for the crisis in Malawi in three ways. It advised the government to sell some of its strategic grain reserve to settle commercial debts; it also advised it to privatise the National Food Reserve Agency (NFRA) which provides food disaster relief (the process that incurred the debts in the first place) and it required the government to remove price controls, fuelling inflation in the price of staple foods.

In May, Malawi Agriculture Minister Aleke Banda reportedly said the IMF had encouraged the government to sell at least part of the reserve in 2000 to reduce debt.

The Fund vehemently denied the accusations.

'Complete fiction'

"This is nonsense," said Frances Hardin, IMF senior press officer. "The NGOs (non-governmental organisations) are simply wrong on this. It is not an IMF policy. There was never a condition that Malawi should sell off the grain reserves to pay any debt. All this is complete fiction."

The Fund has tried to paint the devastating social and economic crisis in Malawi as the result of mismanagement by the government of President Bakili Muluzi, rather than a consequence of policies that emphasise deregulation and privatisation.

"They sold them (grain reserves) all up and they were not able to replenish them because of adverse weather conditions and bad management," said Hardin.

The Fund says it simply "endorsed" a recommendation from the European Commission that Malawi reduce excessive and wasteful grain reserves. Instead, the warehouses were drained.

The IMF is also pointing a finger at the World Bank, which it says was responsible for privatising the Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (ADMARC), the predecessor to the NFRA.

Critics, who include Washington-based NGO Africa Action, say the maize reserves, sold to private traders mostly at below market prices in the new spirit of market liberalisation, would have helped at a time of crop failure.

April's maize harvest was expected to yield 1.9 million metric tonnes but only resulted in 1.3 million metric tonnes. The national demand is 2.2 million metric tonnes.

The NGOs argue that the grain market was liberalised, deregulated and replaced with private traders under the IMF-dictated Structural Adjust Programme (SAP).

Now up to three million people in the nation of 10 million people need urgent food aid.

"The Fund is still in a state of denial," said Irungu Houghton of ActionAid.. "In the last month it has attempted to shift focus from the Government of Malawi to the European Commission and World Bank. This is very worrying."

Price distortions

The IMF also says "price distortions" created when the NFRA sold maize on the domestic market from mid-2000 to Jan 2001 contributed to the shortage.

"These transactions depressed maize prices further after the 2000 bumper harvest, thus creating disincentives for producers and contributing to the shortages in early 2002," said the Fund.

Farmers were left with inadequate income to buy fertilizer and seeds, it added.

ActionAid, one of the few NGOs with offices in Malawi, says that farmers, fearing a shortage at the beginning of 2002, prematurely harvested their crop, further reducing output in the agricultural year that began in April 2002.

As people were going hungry, they also resorted to eating unripe or green maize, starting a vicious circle in which food shortages were likely to be prolonged because people were eating the maize before it had been harvested.

Some farmers also harvested the maize early to avoid theft and to generate some income. Although the crisis was alleviated by April's new harvest, United Nations food agencies concluded in a report in late May that the new harvest was going to be worse than that of 2001.

They projected a shortfall of 485,000 metric tonnes of maize for the period August 2002-March 2003.

But donors' recent tough attitudes toward Malawi do not bode well for the food shortage.

Britain, the African country's single largest donor, recently shelved aid of 18.6 million dollars because of the government's "over-expenditure and lack of fiscal discipline".

The IMF has delayed about US$50 million in debt relief for "non compliance" with its fiscal discipline programme.— IPS