Small Scale Food Production is Basic, Large Scale Production is Not

For months, politicians, journalists and other pundits have been saying that the El Nino rains are coming, it's just a matter of time and then everyone will be able to plant crops. Some areas have been waiting for years for good growing conditions and have been depending on food aid and other handouts to get by.

Well, in some areas, parts of the Rift Valley for example, the rains have started. It would seem to be a good time to start planting, except for one slight problem: there is a national shortage of seeds, especially maize seed, the country's staple food.

Some say the shortage of seeds is due to their being bought up by the government for cheap or free distribution, which hasn't yet happened. Whether that's true or not is unclear, but it's a bad time for uncertainty as the rains may not be adequate and may not last long.

Another article points out that food security is at its worst since 1989. The article, entitled 'Let's go back to the basics', advocates promotion of smallholder production units, arguing that peasant farmers, who are in the majority, need support. This article mentions approvingly the provision of free seeds and fertilizers, along with reduced dependence on rain fed agriculture and greater crop diversity.

However, the article goes on to advocate the encouragement of private sector led agricultural development projects by giving government support to them, too. The naive reader may think that 'private sector led' means that the private sector provides some of the capital needed, rather than expecting the government to foot the bill. However, it doesn't mean this. Rather, the government is always keen to use public money to fund 'private' ventures, which often belong to the government or members of the government anyway.

Then the article does a complete about face and states that 'the only way out is to abandon food production at smallholder level for subsistence to commercial profitable businesses', with the country committing itself to a technology-led agriculture. This is the opposite to going 'back to basics'.

People need food. If the majority of farmers are smallholders then they need to grow the food, for themselves and for others. Food produced by large scale operators will not be affordable to smallholders or to others who get by on some form of subsistence. Putting public money into the private sector will only enrich those who least need it at the expense of those who are now suffering. Going back to basics means supporting people who support themselves and others, that means small farmers, the ones who feed most of the country. Sphere: Related Content

Reducing Fossil Fuel Dependence Is A Must, Not An Alternative

Untold millions of dollars have been spent in recent years prospecting for oil in Kenya. Nothing commercially viable has been found yet, but this hasn't prevented the search from continuing. In the next few weeks the search will intensify in Isiolo in Kenya's Eastern Province.

It's disappointing that leaders in Kenya don't seem to be aware of the pitfalls of depending on fossil fuel energy, considering they are experiencing some of those pitfalls right now. Emergency energy generation to make up for the shortfall from hydroelectric power is very expensive. The ongoing, widespread drought in Kenya means that the country is resorting to emergency energy more and more.

But it has long been recognised that developing countries will feel the effects of climate change the most. As use of fossil fuels contributes to climate change, are the Kenyan politicians and business people with their snouts in the oil trough not able to see the connection between this and greater use of oil?

If even a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars spent on fossil fuel prospecting could be spent on renewable, sustainable and clean energy sources, Kenya could be able to supply all its own energy needs by now. But, egged on by foreign interests, they are frittering away this timely opportunity.

The country has, like many African countries, abundant solar energy potential. They also have vast, mostly untapped geothermal potential. Some areas get enough wind at certain times of the year to produce huge amounts of electricity. And there are, doubtless, many other alternatives to depending on high carbon emission fossil fuels.

Leaving aside the environmental issues, energy minister Kiraitu Murungi has said that oil exploration has been associated with "dictatorship, imperialism, exploitation, neglect of agriculture, marginalisation and civil strife on the [African] continent". But Murungi needn't worry so much about these issues. Kenyans have experienced them all at some time and are experiencing many of them right now.

As for the possibility that discovering oil in Isiolo or anywhere else in Kenya will relieve poverty, I don't see anyone being fooled into believing this. But now is a good time to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, not increase usage. Now is also a good time to explore the alternatives. Perhaps now is the only time. Sphere: Related Content

Westerners Turn to Cannibalism to Solve Fuel Shortages

Here's the deal. Millions of people in Tanzania and other African countries are starving and millions more are threatened with starvation. Many areas are receiving food aid, some almost permanently. Because of prolonged drought, millions of people are not able to grow enough food, resulting in illness and death from both food shortages and water shortages.

Along come the British, the Americans, the Dutch, the Germans, the Malaysians and the Indonesians, and what do they do? Bring food aid? No, they are in Tanzania to 'buy' land on the cheap so they can grow biofuel crops. These countries are worried that their overfed populations may not have enough petrol to drive their lardy arses to the supermarket and buy cheap food which has been grown using cheap labour in developing countries.

These biofuel companies are targeting the most productive land in areas that also have the best water supply. Water supplies are even diverted to serve the purposes of the biofuel crop growers. Small farmers in their thousands are being duped into signing over their land to be used for up to three decades. They are being duped into growing non-food crops for biofuel companies. They are being duped into giving up food production and to using their scarce water supplies to power cars in rich countries.

The Tanzanian and other governments are obligingly allowing these biofuel companies to grow jatropha, sugar cane and palm oil where people could be growing food. These governments are even subsidizing the growing of biofuel crops by foreigners at the expense of the farmers they are dispossessing and starving. What kind of perverse relationship is this?

The last thing countries like Tanzania need now is to give over its most productive land to monocultures, especially non-food monocultures. Such misuse of land is one of the reasons why the country is facing droughts at the moment. And giving small amounts of 'food aid' to countries at the same time as you are also defrauding them out of the means to produce enough food is just despicable.

How many times do Westerners need to be told that the world does not have the capacity to allow them to keep on using resources at the rate they are using them now? They need to reduce their use of resources, not steal more resources from the countries that they have been exploiting for centuries. Sphere: Related Content

The Kenyan Obsession with Maize

Photo: Girls taking maize off the cobb for drying and storage.

The Kenyan obsession with maize could be its undoing. People don't feel they have eaten until they have had some maize, either ugali, a bit like tasteless polenta, or mahindi, a bit like tasteless sweetcorn. True, ugali and mahindi can be filling. They give you a blast of starch and they go nicely with other foods. But they have little nutritional value, apart from the starch.

I feel a bit guilty for criticizing people for being so attached to their staple food. After all, maize yield can be very high per hectare, it's easy to plant and reap and you can get two crops a year in many areas. But there are other foods that are also easy to grow and have similar advantages. And a mixture of foods is better, especially if some of the foods commonly eaten contain some protein and some vitamins. I know staples are expensive, but there are foods that have higher nutritional value than maize. You can just buy buy less of them.

People have been raised on maize, fair enough. But they don't have to raise their children purely on maize. The very fact that maize prices are high at the moment means that it is cost effective to buy some other foodstuffs. So it's a good time to change, just slowly and just a little bit.

As for diversity, the dependence of Kenyans on a small number of crops means that they are particularly susceptible to reduced diversity. Aiming for better yields means that traditional varieties are being dispensed with in favour of seeds from multinational food corporations. They are often sold these seeds on the grounds that they will be drought resistant, high yielding, more nutritious, etc. But this process means that countries like Kenya become less self-reliant and more dependent as they lose diversity. This means that, in the long run, they will suffer more from the effects of drought, climate change, pests, diseases and many other problems. Sphere: Related Content

No Rain, but Plenty of Sun and Wind

Photo: Even Nairobi gets enough sun to generate at least some of its electricity.

The Kenyan government expresses concern at the amount of money that is being spent on emergency power and at the amount of money that is being lost by power outages. Expressing concern is all very well but there are plenty of alternatives to the tired old sources of electricity from hydro and fossil fuels. There is no single source that is best: try them all.

For a start, many parts of Kenya get huge amounts of sun; others get lots of strong wind; and there is an abundance of geothermal potential in parts of Kenya. Fossil fuel shortage is not a recent thing. There were shortages in supply in the 70s and 80s. Throughout the 90s, it was clear that fossil fuels prices would fluctuate and rise, there has been plenty of time to make changes.

Kenya is lucky to have such potential sources of energy. The thing now is to try to build their own generation units, instead of importing expensive technology. Investment in renewable energy will also help keep carbon emissions low and thus reduce the pressure on climate change.

The problems are even more acute in Tanzania, where an estimated 90% of people don't have access to electricity. They also have access to similar potential sources of energy. Yet, I recently saw an article about extremely expensive wind turbines being imported from the UK. If they want cheap energy in Tanzania, they need to produce the products themselves.

The problem is, someone is making a lot of money out of emergency power generation and supplying overpriced technologies, such as wind turbines and hydroelectric plants. But countries like Kenya and Tanzania can take advantage of the low prices of solar panels, which are currently dropping for several reasons.

It's not all bad news. Sphere: Related Content

World Reserves of Phosphorus and other Vital Resources

Photo: Sun setting over Lake Tanganyika behind a field of maize.

We hear a lot and read a lot about 'peak oil' and some other resource shortages facing the world over the next few decades. But The Broker Online has a fascinating article called 'Peak Phosphorus'. It describes how intimately modern agriculture is connected with phosphorus supplies, one of the main constituents of fertilizers. Along with several other minerals, rising prices will seriously affect the price of food.

Indeed, the prices were most recently influenced by the oil price hike, which resulted in a lot of crops being planted for biofuels. In addition to depriving people of food, land and livelihoods, destroying large tracts of land and using up and polluting enormous quantities of water, the crazy plan to increase production of biofuels will also speed up the time that phosphorus reserves will become exhausted.

Phosphorus supply is even behind Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara and the US's tacit support for that occupation, because Western Sahara the largest source of phosphorus after China and the US. The US have already peaked but they have a useful little bilateral agreement with Morocco, so they're in no hurry for that particular repressive regime to end.

Other resources that are in short supply or will be in short supply in the next few decades include sulphuric acid. There was a time when it was said to be possible to judge a country's industrial output by its consumption of sulphuric acid because it has such widespread use in industry.

The simple fact is that developed countries need to find ways to reduce their use of resources. There are only so many tricks in the box to substitute for resources that are running low when we are just exhausting the natural resources that will allow humanity to survive. The big users, the rich, developed countries, need to change their lifestyle. Otherwise they will be wiped out too, eventually.

And big subsidizers, such as the EU and the US, need to practice what the preach and stop encouraging overconsumption. It's time to recover as many wasted products as possible and consider the long term future of all people, not just the comfortably off ones.

It's worth advocating for change because the most vulnerable people will probably suffer the worst and most immediate consequences of our behaviour, the people who least deserve to pay for society's stupidity. Sphere: Related Content