We attempt to answer why two countries so alike as Argentina and Malawi have implemented similarly discriminatory policies against their large agricultural sector, and then examine the effects of those policies upon the long run economic performance of both countries. By analyzing their agricultural policymaking process and using descriptive statistics and time series econometric techniques, we find that policy responses to exogenous economic shocks are to a large extent endogenous to the policymaking process -specifically, discriminatory policies are more likely the more fragmented the agricultural sector and the more informal the productive organization- and that discriminatory policies negatively affected long term growth.