Enlighten farmers on competitive agriculture

Is food a human right? And if it is, how do we ensure we make enough of it? As it is, food security is a perennial topic for our nation. But recent months have brought a new and more ominous wave of predictions and protest about global warming and environmental breakdown.

The figures look grim, as we watch ice caps melting and the sea rising to engulf coastal communities everywhere. But while changes to our land mass is bad, its bearable, the human race can survive it: far more worrying are predictions that changing temperatures will begin to close down our food supply.

And what has been worrying me most of all in that, is the climatic starting point in Kenya.

If the UK, for instance, gets warmer and wetter, it may even grow more food. Scientists are predicting a 1 – 2 per cent increase in global rainfall, with countries that are wet likely to get wetter, in heavy downpours during the northern hemisphere’s cold and wet winters. That isn’t a straight line to failed crops.

However, if Kenya gets hotter and drier, the story on food becomes very different.

As it is, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation has identified Kenya as a high potential food producer, with the capacity to deliver enough food for most of Africa. But we are already sadly underperforming. The reasons are many. We have poor soil fertility, with the crop rotation that maintained soil health throughout history elsewhere rarely practiced in Kenya. We also have a strange relationship with nitrogen-based fertilizer, as a subsidized dependency, but very patchy access.

However, in recent months I have come close to a couple of agricultural sectors that have shared absolutely similar misfortunes, in running on old, low yield seeds that also just happen to be the least resilient to drought and temperature changes.

In fact, we have a massive problem around seed stock and our seed nurseries. It’s not that high-yield seeds haven’t been developed. They have been, half-a-century’s worth, from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation (Kalro) and its predecessors, amounting to many hundreds of high-yield and drought-resistant varieties.

But nurseries aren’t growing them, large seed companies don’t produce them, agrovets don’t stock them, and according to Kalro, as a result, fewer than three per cent of all farmers use any of them: as the sum of many decades of research efforts.

Work your way up the supply chain, and the agrovets argue they don’t stock high-yield seeds because farmers don’t buy them. It’s a remarkable claim. For sure, I have met a lot of farmers, and I know that conservatism can reign. Many do, exactly, do what they have always done, so if they grow a type of seed that is what they always ask for.

But explain ‘ok, you can have this seed and produce 10kg of the crop in 12 weeks, or this seed and produce 14kg in 10 weeks’, and I haven’t yet met a farmer who didn’t opt for the higher yield. Indeed, in the tiny areas where high-yield seeds have taken hold, like red onions for instance, the change has created mini-booms.

So, I think the problem with our poor, old seeds is one of communication. I don’t think anyone chooses a car that uses twice the petrol or an employee that does half the work, and there isn’t really loyalty to low yielding seeds that crop late and fail on poor rainfall.

Farmers just don’t know the names and types of the seed ‘super models’, the nurseries don’t chase them as commercial opportunities, and we communicators don’t think the fact that seeds can triple our national output – and retain that vibrancy even as the climate changes – makes them worth a story.

I think they are. I think high-yield seeds could be called something else. They could be called ‘enough food for all’. They could be called ‘farmers, be richer’. And they could be called ‘Kenya rises’. But I guess we can stay instead with jargon about climate change resilience and suchlike, and make sure some more that no-one sees that the point is Sh200,000 extra per harvest for anyone who opens that door, even as the climate changes.