Education, technology the keys to ending food insecurity, say experts

Food relief is serious business in East and Central Africa, especially in the light of statistics such as 20 million people facing acute food insecurity in the region as at August, with most being at “crisis” and “emergency” levels. With Kenya named among affected countries the big question is whether any part of the country– the perennially hungry arid and semi-arid lands (Asals) included – should be relying on food donations more than 50 years after Independence.

Food security analyst and disaster risk management expert Stephen McDowell blames perennial handouts in northern Kenya on failure to tap the region’s immense potential. Policy, public investment and the views of decision makers need to change, he says. Mr McDowell seeks to dispel the notion that Kenyans must till land or herd livestock to survive.

In the next 10 or 20 years, most people will be living in towns, and a small proportion will be left farming and looking after animals. Of those who stay, the innovative and smart can have a bright future even with changing weather and declining soil fertility as they find new solutions and exploit emerging opportunities.

Mr McDowell works in the Regional Food Security and Nutrition Working Group that was formed in 2000 and is currently chaired by IGAD. The group has a membership of 80 government, non-government, UN, academic and private sector bodies.

While it started as a humanitarian outfit, the 2010-2011 Horn of Africa drought and famine opened the group’s eyes on the need to focus on facts on the ground rather than relying on newspaper reports. “If you are a food security analyst, you count; you are crazy for counting,” says Mr McDowell noting the discrepancy between famine catastrophe headlines that are not always borne from the reality on the ground.

“You count dead animals. You can count people who were forced to migrate and live elsewhere. You are very concerned by and watch closely the number of sick people or deaths reported by the Ministry of Health” says Mr McDowell, who spent most of 2011 in rural Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya to better understand famine and food insecurity.

“The things I was counting didn’t match with what I was reading in the newspapers or what people were writing about or what we were analysing inside our famine early warning system; something was missing,” he said. “There was suffering and hardship, but not the catastrophe we were reading about.”

Rather than counting animal carcases, or tens of thousands fleeing from Kenya’s rural areas, what he saw was change in the arid lands – in agricultural practices and in the rural areas. There was a generation of transformation. People were changing, particularly the youth—even during that hard times. “It’s exciting; it’s good; it’s positive; and it’s progressive.”

Debunking the myth that when crops fail, people starve to death or at least experience food shortage, Mr McDowell noted that the technological revolution was changing all that.

“There’s television, the Internet; if you look at the level of education, it’s not what it was 20-30 years ago. People read; they’re exposed to the world. They don’t see life as digging and so they are moving on... It’s a generational transformation,” he says.

Hence, while people will be affected by drought and famine, probably many more will say, “Enough! I’m going to town’”.

The food security analyst says pastoralism – the Asals mainstay – is not the same as we have traditionally known it. He gives the example of mama mbogas (vegetable vendors) from Gachie, Kiambu, who are growing sukuma wiki (kale) not for subsistence, but for sale. For them, vegetable growing is serious business.

The fact that Kiambu’s economy has almost transformed from farming to real estate development does not portend calamity and the smart mama mbogas are taking advantage of their peri-urban domicile and targeting city dwellers with fresh produce from hired land. Rural change –whether in farming or livestock communities – is often borne from the ingenuity and business acumen of educated youth.

Mr McDowell gives the example of Kisii, a densely populated region where youth are not only shaking up the transport and security sectors, some are revolutionising pastoral practice. He gives the example of one man from Kisii who has hired idle land in Makueni and is rearing livestock for sale. Unlike the traditional herder, the rancher from Kisii is not scared of drought – he has his acreage and water.

He has made a fortune from climate change, from other people’s failure to successfully adapt.

Independence policies

“We’re going into El Niño at the end of the year, which means grass is going to be there. He knows he’ll buy animals at depressed prices in the dry season from poor people. He gets the animals cheap, feeds them. It’s serious business,” says Mr McDowell.

Disaster risk management expert Abdishakur Othowai, who works at Igad’s Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (Icpac) in Dagoretti, Nairobi, faulted post-independent Kenya’s policies that, he said, were against pastoralism. “This includes the bedrock of Kenya’s economic policy (Sessional Paper No. 10), which clearly stated that no investment should be done in Northern Kenya and no investment in pastoralism,” he said.

While noting that new draft policies have been formulated recently to address this historical injustice, necessary legislation is still pending. Mr Othowai regrets the way the pastoralist economy has evolved in Kenya.

“Once you get educated, you are out of that system. You may support your relatives who are pastoralists with remittances, but education gets you out the pastoral economy.”

He notes one of the spins created by Western education was that undertaking economic activity pursued by one’s parents who did not go to school draws one backwards. “Thus children of farmers who get university education don’t want to be farmers. Likewise those whose parents herded goats don’t want to do the same. This, however, is not true of the other parts of the world, for example New Zealand or Australia.

“There are family traditions in the cattle and sheep rearing areas of those countries where children are now practising sheep or cattle ranching for 10 generations and yet some of them graduate from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford but go back to keep on the tradition,” Mr Othowai said.

“Even here in Kenya, Tom Cholmondeley (Fifth Lord Delamere) is keeping cattle and sheep in Soysambu, a practice started by the First Lord Delamere back in 1901,” he points out.

“We need to rethink how we should create pride in what we do and launch the next generation of pastoralists who practise value addition livestock keeping,” said the disaster management expert, who dabbles in commercial goat rearing.

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