As we head into the world’s biggest ever global famine, Kenya remains far too vulnerable.
But there are things that every family and farmer can do to help keep themselves fed in 2022 and 2023: as we run out of wheat, bread, and rice, and suffer short supplies of fertiliser just as we try to maximise the yields of everything else.
Farmers in the West were reporting last week that fertiliser prices are now four times higher than a year ago, pushed up by multiple factors.
Urea is a critical element of fertiliser, most often made from coal. But its production consumes a huge amount of energy.
So it has taken a double hit on soaring oil prices, as energy producers revisit coal usage as an alternative, and as oil and gas price rises increase most country’s electricity prices.
With urea prices climbing, China, one of the five biggest urea exporters in the world, banned its urea exports last year, to ensure supplies and calmer prices for its own farmers.
This reduced world traded supplies by up to 10 percent, adding to the price pressure, and, by March this year, urea prices were running at 300 percent of their March 2021 levels. And then the Russian government advised its fertiliser producers not to export urea either.
Russia is the world’s largest exporter of urea, at 14-16 percent of the world supply, so that has sent prices soaring afresh, now to 400 percent of last year’s levels.
So fertiliser is way more expensive, but so what? Our government is subsidising fertiliser, with a Sh5.7 billion scheme, it has announced.
Well, I hate to be gloomy here. But first off, we just experienced the government subsidising petrol, and the reality is, the government’s finances and cash flow are very stretched indeed, so believe if you will that it has set aside Sh5.7 billion of cash for fertiliser importers.
But even if it has the cash, the problem isn’t only price, which continues to rise, but the volume of supply. When you knock over 25 percent out of a supply, the shortage doesn’t get spread exactly evenly across all buyers.
For sure, we can hope that we might have some advantage over the world’s other nations, including the West, or some extra leverage with the other big exporters — Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Yet, this constellation in 2022 is now so ugly that it raises a vast number of issues around dependency, and even globalisation.
Our farmers can bet on Kenya managing to get all its fertiliser, despite that 25 percent hole in total traded supply — and thus bet on some other country with the same needs as us, suffering a 50 percent gap in supply as we get part of their remaining fertiliser supplies too — or we decide not to risk our hunger on that bet and find a new solution on fertiliser.
Specifically, we can move so that if we get the commercial fertiliser, we’re good, but if we don’t get it, we’re good too. Corporates call that risk management, and the truth is it’s a basic of successful farming.
For if we don’t cover ourselves with a Plan A and a Plan B, it’s possible to bet the whole farm on one risk, that goes against us.
However, the human body produces urea, and the reality is we can give soils most of the nutrients they need to grow healthy plants from human urine.
Somehow, that doesn’t hold the appeal of government subsidies on supplies we may not get. I even had one reader write to me: “Human urine is a tough call in this part of the world, Jenny”. Like it isn’t in most other parts of the world too?
But it’s completely sterile (no germs) and packed with the exact same components as fertiliser. Add to that, repeated studies that show it fertilises well and improves yields.
So, we can spend a Treasury mint subsidising what little fertiliser we can get, and leaving everyone else without, or collect urine, let the water evaporate, and make our own. Risks are often a choice.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
