In this book, Ephraim Chirwa and Andrew Dorward address a topical issue in contemporary debates about efforts to revive African agriculture following the pioneering experiment with the implementation of the smart subsidies in the 2005/06 growing season that helped Malawi break free from two consecutive decades of chronic food insecurity. During this particular growing season, Malawi produced surplus maize in the region of 500,000 metric tonnes over and above the annual food requirements then estimated at 2·1 million metric tonnes. This ‘success’ invariably triggered a wave of experiments with smart subsidies across the continent to the extent that having hardly featured on the policy landscape in 2000, by 2011 ‘10 African countries spent roughly US $1.05 billion on [subsidies], amounting to 28·6% of their public expenditures on agriculture’ (Jayne and Rashid Reference Jayne and Rashid2013: 547).

In rolling out the smart subsidies, most countries have used the Malawi experiences as a frame of reference. Consequently, the Malawi subsidy programme has been the focus of rigorous scrutiny at the international level particularly from the sceptics of subsidies as a fool-proof strategy to reverse decades of underperformance of the agricultural sector across the continent. In the context of this debate, this book on Malawi's recent experiences is quite timely as a somewhat sober assessment of the potential and limitations of subsidies as a strategy to revitalise African agriculture. The main strength of the book in this regard is that it is based on more than five consecutive years of systematic and rigorous evaluations of Malawi's subsidy programme. This provided the authors with the opportunity to fully grasp most of the underlying nuances of the programme from various perspectives, and therefore tease out their relevant practical implications.

Divided into three major parts, the book offers a critical, reflective and fairly balanced analysis of the Malawi subsidy programme offering useful insights to scholars, policy-makers and practitioners. In the background section, the authors anchor the contemporary wave of subsidy experiments across that continent in a historical context with particular focus on the changing practice and theory. This is followed by an outline of the context in which the Malawi programme was implemented and its key features. The second part focuses on the implementation of the programme and its impacts. There is particular focus on direct impacts, economy-wide effects, impact on input market development and overall cost-benefit analysis. The third and final part of the book raises two key strategic issues in the implementation of subsidies. These are targeting and access to inputs and graduation of beneficiaries from subsidy programmes.

The authors have been quite thorough in the treatment of the issues that they have raised in this book, fully making use of insights from their extensive empirical work on the programme. While their analyses on some of the most controversial issues such as cost-benefit analysis, targeting beneficiaries and graduation of beneficiaries have not necessarily provided prescriptive policy tools, they have nonetheless provided a framework within which meaningful debate can be carried out. Nonetheless, the major highlight is that regardless of some of the weaknesses of the programme, it has helped Malawi to achieve some semblance of food security with essentially the same level of subsidised inputs. It is estimated that Malawi's population has grown by about 25% since the introduction of the subsidy programme in the 2005/06 growing season.

While the authors somewhat touched on the politics and policies that influenced and shaped the adoption and the design of the subsidy programme, they do not carry through this theme in the empirical analysis of contentious issues such as economy-wide effects of subsidies, cost-benefit analysis, targeting and access to input subsidies and even the notion of graduation. This could have either been addressed through a separate chapter that reflected on the political economy connotations and implications of the issues that they have dealt, or by mainstreaming such analysis in each of the chapters addressing the contentious empirical issues. This would have helped readers to better understand fully most of the interesting conclusions that the authors make in this book.

All in all, this is an excellent book and a must read for scholars, policy-makers and practitioners interested in fully understanding the key debates about the contemporary wave of subsidies and their practical implications in design and implementation in order to achieve their intended goals and objectives.