Food insecurity has surged in Kenya in recent years, driven by drought, locusts and invasion of farms by Fall Armyworm. It has also been exacerbated by global events that have seen food prices rise to unaffordable levels for many.
Yet, little attention has fallen on the health legacy this period of growing hunger is creating for generations ahead.
In a recent survey of farmers across every county that my own team ran, we found over 42 percent reporting their families had gone hungry at least once in the past three years due to crop failure.
Yet, studies show that periods of hunger cause what one scientist has termed a ‘dramatic’ increase in cancer cases in those affected.
Even studies of relatively brief periods of hunger, of a single season, show a jump in later cancer cases in those affected.
And some are extreme. Many studies have looked at those who suffered food insecurity in early childhood, or during gestation, and discovered a leap in their later-life hypertension from 9 percent of unaffected adults to 24 percent — as well as increased heart disease and cancer.
But as more studies are being done, it is becoming clear that hunger is creating other high-risk groups too. A review of 18 different studies found that across all cancers, adolescents affected by food shortages had a 76 percent greater risk of later-life cancer.
Likewise, a period of hunger increases later liver cancer cases in men, breast cancer cases in women and stomach and colorectal cancers across both genders.
More worrying still are statistical studies that have now found that hunger in a paternal grandfather predicts the likelihood of his sons getting cancer. With cancer treatment having been given real attention in recent years, we have moved the dial on some of our survival rates. But there are few funds or facilities to pick up all the extra cancers that lie ahead for those who are food insecure today.
Moreover, the troubling additional issue in all this mounting evidence is that it only adds data on subsequent mortalities to an affliction that we already knew was deadly.
Malnutrition undermines the immune system, and sees many, young and old, die of infections they would have survived if well fed. It affects the brain development of young children in ways that continue for a lifetime.
But as we also see ballooning lifestyle diseases borne of periods of hunger, it only brings home the life-or-death nature of our success in agriculture. These challenges can be addressed if the government gets its priorities right in the agriculture sector.
For governments spread across dozens of competing issues, making food successfully is and always will be the first base in protecting everyone from the vicissitudes of all else.
