“The Smell Makes Us Hungry”: When Food Is Not Medicine in Highland Madagascar

In the wake of major disruptions to global supply chains during the Covid‐19 pandemic, the island nation of Madagascar pursued initiatives for auto‐suffisance , self‐sufficiency, in food supplies and medical treatments. Farming communities in the central highlands experienced an injunction to expand cultivation of both subsistence crops and medicinal herbs for #MadeinMadagascar drugs. Drawing on more than 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article considers how Malagasy farmers apprehended such shifting production regimes through bodily and sensory phenomena. The medicinal crop's smell “emptied the belly” and left farmers hungry. This “side effect” of drugs‐in‐the‐making lengthened into a chronic condition as pandemic inflation, the political economy of drug production, and extreme weather imperiled food access. Highland farmers encountered mounting hunger, leading to the abandonment of state projects for medicinal cash crops in pursuit of their own subsistence cultivation. By tracking conditions where food and medicine come into direct conflict in Malagasy landscapes, this paper illuminates how pandemic mitigation efforts, in this case for domestic drugs, contribute to widespread hunger and food insecurity.