You don't bite the hand that feeds

By Matthew Chapman BBC News, Malawi

Roving around the world as a correspondent, one of the most useful qualities you can develop is an iron stomach. Sometimes you cannot be too picky about what you eat. However, as Matthew Chapman discovered on a recent trip to Malawi, what you are going to eat for dinner and the story you are working on can sometimes be inextricably linked.

Malawi is suffering one of its worst food shortages in years

I could not quite make out what the children by the side of the road were doing, as our car shot past them on the way to the Malawian capital, Lilongwe.

At first it looked like they were waving toasting forks at us.

"What are they doing?" I asked our driver, hoping partly that he might slow the car to a less hair-raising speed so he could reply.

"Maize," he seemed to shout above the racket of the jolting car.

"Ah," I said, "maize like corn on the cob?"

He brought the car to a halt and a child ran up and waggled something under my nose which definitely did not look like any corn on the cob I had ever seen.

Malawi's dependence on aid means many locals have a love-hate relationship with the donors

"They're mice," said my driver, "roast mice".

And there indeed on each prong of the fork was a little roast mouse with singed tail and whiskers.

It was a local delicacy, I was told.

I declined the offer of a crunchy mouse and we drove on.

I tell this story partly because I am a vegetarian and travelling the world as a vegetarian reporter allows me to amass a library of stories to regale horrified veggies back in Britain.

In fact I assumed I might be eating those mice sooner rather than later, after failing to find any vegetarian food in this meat-loving nation.

On the edge

But I also tell this story because food - the lack of it and the price of it - was to become a recurring theme during my week in Malawi.

This landlocked country, shaped rather like a chilli, wedged into south-east Africa, has been referred to by some, rather unkindly, as an economic basket case.

Every year it teeters on the edge of famine.

This year humanitarian groups fear that a third of the population will face a shortage of food.

It is for this reason that, during a drive around the capital Lilongwe, I saw an alphabet soup of acronyms printed on offices staffed by non-governmental organisations and donor governments from all over the world.

Britain, in the form of the Department For International Development, is one of the larger funders here, pumping in more than £60m ($110m) of aid money.

'Phantom aid'

The president has banned exports of maize to ease the food crisis

The reason I was there was to investigate whether DfID, as it is known, has been wasting large amounts of money on paying administration costs and fees to American consultants.

This is what one British charity has called "phantom aid".

What this means in practice is that, while it may be called aid in DfID's budget, the reality is that significant amounts of this money are redirected to the Western countries who supply the consultants.

That night I sat down to dinner in my hotel to eat the only vegetarian item on the menu.

Here I was in Africa enjoying beautifully cooked linguine (pasta) and roast vegetables, which cost me the equivalent of a week's salary for an ordinary Malawian.

As I sat there, I leafed through a sheaf of documents I had been handed that day by a Malawian man who was disgusted by the free spending that had gone on in a DfID funded project that he had worked for.

Staff salaries

The documents listed in minute detail how an American organisation hired by DfID had spent the £3m ($5.4m) it had been given to run a project which was helping to support the committee system in the Malawian parliament.

Firstly £1m ($1.8m) had been spent on the salaries of the entirely American, ex-pat staff.

On top of that, they had spent nearly £700,000 ($1.25m) on hotel and food bills for their staff and for Malawian MPs.

In fact a great deal of the wining and dining that went on had happened not only in the hotel I was in but in the very hotel restaurant I was sitting in.

DfID told me later they were happy that the expenses were all in line with the needs of the project.

As he came to clear my plate away, the waiter asked me a question he had obviously been dying to ask: why did I not eat meat?

As I ran through some of the health benefits including the fact that it is a diet low in fat, I realised I had entirely lost him.

Having the luxury to pick and choose what to eat was, I suppose, as alien a concept to him as were the habits of the hundreds of ex-pats who drive around this town in their four-wheelers.

Curry

Malawi's dependence on aid means many locals have a love-hate relationship with the donors.

"We don't like to bite the hand that feeds us," said the head of one Malawian NGO, who has received money from DfID.

"We feel we can't complain, even when we see you foreigners coming in here and eating up that aid money with your wages," he said.

But to show he had no hard feelings he kindly invited me to dinner.

That night his wife cooked for me one of the best vegetarian curries I had eaten for years. Roast mouse was a distant memory.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 27 August, 2005 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.