Educational Media Reviews Online

Malawi’s Green Revolution: Seeking Sustainability, 1998-2015 examines the efforts of a small, poor, and densely-populated nation in southeastern Africa to combat its acute food shortages. With the help of international donors, Malawi’s government began a “Starter Pack” program to distribute on a large scale, a small amount of high-efficiency and high-yielding seeds and fertilizer to benefit much of the country’s suffering population. This documentary tells the story of how this program was very successful at resolving the food shortages and turned Malawi from a food importer to food exporter, yet the international support dropped off after two years over concerns of cost and creating dependency rather than a sustainable solution. After running a scaled-back version of the program that targeted essentially just the poorest of the poor, and returning quickly to a food crisis, the government decided to fully fund the program.

As the documentary is primarily informational, the film itself is not visually-impressive. The filmmaker, Charles Mann, uses mainly interview footage along with some lower-quality VHS video supplied by the Malawi government. The interviews include many experts who were directly involved in the planning and implementation of the program, as well as a number of the small landholders who benefited through the program. Although the experts provided interesting insight into the situation, the science and research that was the basis of the program, and the larger issues of food security, the film does not feel well-organized or cohesive as a whole. There is no clear introduction to the topic nor is there a distinct conclusion, and it is separated into two parts that look as though each part was created years apart. While the film is fairly brief, one of the strengths is that it includes numerous additional mini-features, each of which might be useful on its own in an educational setting.

Overall, Malawi’s Green Revolution is recommended with reservations because even though the sum of its parts is not excellent, the topics covered bring up numerous important questions, providing excellent opportunities for debate and discussion, and a place from which to explore broader or related topics. This documentary is more like a case study, and it explores through a narrow lens the food insecurity and sustainable social safety net of this relatively-unknown African nation, while the overlying problems and potential solutions are likely to be hugely important in a future of climate change and skyrocketing populations. Malawi’s Green Revolution is not going to find large audiences in the broader public, but will find a suitable place in high school and college classrooms with the great potential for inspiring discussions on Africa, geopolitics, international aid, applied agricultural sciences, and food policy.