estimated that at minimum 105,000 tons of maize produced on dimba land are missed in the
smallholder crop estimates (FEW February 1996). The production of maize and other food crops
on estates has also not been measured. Estimates of this production have been consistently low.
In addition, while there is evidence of considerable production on public lands, no estimate of
this amount is available. Finally, with the traditional focus on maize, past and potential expansion
of other food groups has been underestimated. This is particularly true of rootcrops. It is
estimated that a shift from local maize to cassava could increase caloric-based food production per
hectare by 316 percent with little change in inputs or cash requirements (Simmons 1995). In
addition, present estimates of cassava production is collected in tonnage on a dry weight bases.
Calculation of maize equivalents of this tonnage in the food gap, on the other hand, has been
done on a fresh weight bases. The maize equivalent of fresh weight cassava is only a third of dry
weight. All of these biases seriously call into question the validity of the food gap estimate.

3.1.2 Relevance of Food Gap to Food Security


 An analysis of a food gap is not very relevant to food security. Among the problems of
using a food gap as a guide for food security is that the estimated food requirementsgenerated
by a food gap analysis are based on an assumption that everybody in the population gets his or
her due share as determined by nutritional criteria. Reality is hardly like this. In fact, the
distribution of food in the population is more likely to be governed by market forces, including
the distribution of income, assets and prices, than by nutritional considerations. There are some
who can afford to, and actually do, consume more than their nutritional needs, and certainly in
Malawi there are many others who are unable to produce or to acquire enough food to meet their
nutritional needs. In so far that people have to depend on public distribution, it is equally unlikely
that government and donors can either afford or fine-tune the distribution of food in line with each
person's nutritional needs.

 Secondly, the food gap calculations of food requirements are also based on the assumption
that the share of total dietary energy obtained from particular food or groups of food remains
constant over the years. In fact, these shares are likely to vary a great deal as people make their
choices on the basis of changes in relative prices and relative abundance. More likely than not,
in a year with poor grain harvests, the share of total energy people obtain from grains is likely
to be lower than usual while the share of other food groups is higher than usual.
 Thirdly, apart from year to year fluctuations, the use of data from earlier years about the
 sources of dietary energy from different sources misses the currently observed tendency for the
 relative importance of cereals in the diets to decline as increasing population pressure on limited
 land resources makes the traditionally consumed foods unaffordable.

 It must be clearly understood that policies which make use of such national food gap
 calculations can be seriously biased in at least two ways. In Malawi there are indications that both
 biases have actually occurred. For one, the observation that a national food gap does not exist,
 for example, in a good production year, can easily create the illusion that food security has been
 achieved when it has not been; thereby reducing resolve to address the special needs of people


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