To stop starvation, Kenya must stop fire-fighting approach to food security

How can Kenya feed its future doubled population, given its fire-fighting approach to food security?

The flames of famine are flaring in the usual suspect districts in Kenya with the accompanying appeals for help for starving men, women, and children.

Ignited by the usual reason — failed rains — and as the government runs around to put out the fire, I wonder how prepared we are for a future that is predicted to get even worse.

Experts estimate that in 50 years, the world’s population will stand at over 9 billion people and to feed it, agricultural productivity needs to increase by 50 to 70 per cent.

Climate change, expected to lead to more extreme and erratic climatic conditions, will further complicate this grim situation. One way to increase food production is to open up more land to agriculture.

However, the rapidly increasing population and growing urban areas and the need to conserve forests limits the land available for this expansion. We will just have to produce more food on the land size we have.

And it must be in a way that does not negatively affect the environment. How can Kenya, with most of its people living in poverty and relying on subsistence farming for their livelihood and whose number is expected to double by 2050, be ready to meet these future challenges if we are currently still grappling with food shortages?

The government must invest in agricultural research to develop new technologies that increase productivity. Farmers need to start growing new crop varieties — high yielding crops with resistance to drought, frost, floods, pests, and diseases and, where possible, with improved nutritional value.

This calls for the use of up-to-date technologies that can hasten the development of the improved crops. Unfortunately, the debate on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has overshadowed other useful existing biotechnologies such as marker-assisted breeding that speeds up the time it takes to develop new varieties and tissue culture that helps in controlling spread of disease among vegetative propagated plants.

Conventional breeding is a time consuming exercise. Scientists cross different varieties with the desired traits in the hope that they will pass them on to their off-spring. In many cases, they cannot determine if they have succeeded until the crops are fully grown and tested for many years.

However, genetic markers that help the scientists to establish if the genes associated with the targeted traits are present in the new crosses at an early stage shorten the time taken to release new varieties almost by half. The breeding is also more accurate.

Research is expensive and time consuming, but it pays off in the long run. A study conducted by Arega Alene and Ousmane Coulibaly from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture estimates that the average rate of return from agricultural research in sub-Saharan Africa can be as high as 55 per cent.

It further showed that it was reducing the number of poor people in the region by 2.3 million annually. Agricultural research has also been stressed in the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme, an initiative of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development that spells out the continent’s vision for agriculture.

Under it, African countries pledged to increase their agriculture funding to a minimum of 10 per cent of their national budgets. Kenya signed on in July 2010 and though it has made significant progress to meet the targets, it is still not yet there.

Fires are destructive. Putting them out is an expensive exercise. Therefore, fire-proofing your house is the best defence. If Kenya wants to avoid the cyclic appearance of depressing faces of starving children and dying old men and women, it must stop its fire-fighting approach to food security.

Of course developing new improved varieties and other useful technologies is but one side of the coin. They need to get to the farmers, especially the poorest who may not have the resources to purchase them.

They must be accompanied by a good extension system to train farmers on good farming practices necessary to get the high yields and most importantly, good infrastructure and markets to absorb the increased production.

Ms Njuguna is regional corporate communications officer at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. The views expressed here are her own.