By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, Kenya: As the vagaries of drought wreak havoc in Kenya’s agricultural sector due to more failed rainfall seasons – with 2022 alone showing signs of a serious hydrological and ecological drought, the agricultural sector is now at a crossroads.
In the absence of sufficient urgency to curb greenhouse gas emissions, it is becoming too hot to farm in Kenya – leading the government to declare drought a national disaster in September 2021.
Derrick Kinyanjui, an agricultural extension officer based in Nyeri County, at the foothills of Mt Kenya, affirms that confronted by extreme, intense, and frequent climate events such as record-breaking prolonged dry spells, “Kenya’s current agriculture and farming systems are too weak to overcome challenges brought upon us by changing weather. Our economy depends on agriculture but the situation is such that farm households are barely producing enough for subsistence consumption let alone for commercial purposes.”
For farmers, the sun is intense and too close, and rainfall is far and in between. Unlike their forefathers, it is impossible for farmers of today to look at the clouds or soil to determine when the rains will come. The weather has morphed into an unpredictable phenomenon. Consequently, food basket regions are slowly being wiped off Kenya’s agricultural belts – as farmlands in Central Kenya increasingly turn into concrete real estate.
Against a backdrop of agricultural and food systems that are losing the battle to climate change, there is now hope for millions of smallholder farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture estimates show that Kenya has about 8.6 million farmers – 81 percent of all farmers in Kenya are smallholder farmers.
The lifeline for these farmers is in the Food and Agriculture Declaration endorsed by more than 130 world leaders at the COP28 UAE. The declaration has been widely lauded as the key to unlocking the impasse between climate on one hand and, food and agriculture systems, on the other.
“This is the first time in the history of UN’s COP Summits that we have had an agricultural declaration in response to the most pressing issues facing the world today – hunger and associated challenges such as malnutrition on one hand and climate change on the other. The agriculture declaration seeks to build agriculture and climate-resilient food systems while also addressing agriculture’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions,” says climate, agriculture, and development expert Grace Gakii (PhD).
Kenya contributes less than 0.1 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions per year. But the severe sharp effects of climate change are piercing the very heart of an economy propped up by rainfed agriculture. After five consecutive failed rainy seasons, more than 6.4 million people in Kenya, among them 602,000 refugees, are in need of humanitarian assistance – representing a 35 percent increase from 2022.
It is the highest number of people in need of aid in more than 10 years, says Ann Rose Achieng, a Nairobi-based climate activist. She says that in food security, Kenya is hurtling full speed towards a national disaster as “at least 677,900 children and 138,800 pregnant and breastfeeding women in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid regions alone are facing acute malnutrition. Nearly 70 percent of our wildlife was lost in the last 30 years.”
According to the Africa Agriculture Status Report 2022, “for Africa, accelerating the transformation of our food systems is more vital than ever. Africa has a few other incentives for transforming its food system; with one of the most degraded agricultural soils in the world and increasing droughts, Africa will face significant exposure to water-related climate risks in the future.”
At least 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s rural population depends on agriculture as its primary source of income. More than 95 percent of agriculture is reliant on rainfall, according to the report. In Kenya, an estimated 98 percent of agriculture is rainfed. As such, the report finds that the consequences of unpredictable rainfall, rising temperatures, extreme drought, and low soil carbon will further lower crop yields exposing Africa’s poorest communities to increasingly intense climate- and water-related hazards with disastrous results.
Back to COP28’s landmark Agriculture declaration, Gakii says this is the time to reset, stressing that agroecology “is the way to go. As a system, it will facilitate the attainment of food sovereignty and climate justice. The agroecology way takes into consideration climate change and pursues farming methods that are in harmony with nature. Agroecology conserves natural ecosystems in and around the farm. Meaning, that the system works with nature and not against nature. For instance, chemical and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are not applied in the agroecology system to reduce their adverse environmental impacts.”
Food sovereignty is the right of people to healthy, nutritious, and culturally acceptable food, accessible and produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. It is also about people’s right to define their own food and agriculture production systems. Food sovereignty aims at ensuring an active rural environment, free of poverty. It keeps wealth in the farmers’ hands, respects the environment, and produces safe and quality food.
This is critical in light of ongoing rural structural changes and lack of adequate policy support for agroecological systems of production. The current industrial agro-food regime has altered the sustainable systems of food production opening the door to a plethora of many other challenges.
The Agricultural Declaration has been lauded as a springboard for countries such as Kenya to achieve food sovereignty – whose pillars include a focus on food for people, values food producers, localizing food systems, putting control locally, building knowledge and skills, and working with nature.
In the absence of agroecological principles, irreversible losses of unique organisms and numerous other challenges to agriculture are multiplying because ecosystem functions that depend on these organisms and their complex interactions are being lost at an alarming rate. In the context of climate change and unpredictable shocks such as global pandemics, the need for resilience in global food systems has become even more pressing.
“In Africa for instance, 20 to 80 percent of the overall food and agriculture production would be significantly challenged by climate uncertainties if left unmitigated – extensively affecting crop production and nutrition patterns. The agriculture declaration has been termed a lifeline for it presents an opportunity to transform food and agriculture systems in a just, equitable way and without leaving anyone behind and there is no better approach than the agroecology way,” says Gakii.
It further stresses that agroecology is a time-horned proven agriculture and food system that captures the intricate nexus between sustainable agriculture, climate-resilient food systems, and climate. Importantly, it provides practical, low-cost cost, and high-impact solutions to countries cornered by the effects of increasing global emissions that are manifesting through low production and increasing hunger, pushing the world off track with the global goal to end hunger, achieving food security, improving nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture in line with UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
