Food lesson from East African neighbours

 

President Samia Suluhu with the President of Rwanda, President Paul Kagame in Kigali on Monday. PHOTO | FILE

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

Summary

·         The dry spell has hit other Eastern African countries, too, but their food prices aren’t as high yet as Kenya’s.

·         Some of Kenya’s partners in the East African Community might offer it some lessons in dealing long-term with the myriad problems it faces.

·         One case is what happened in Rwanda. Parts of the country that were once battered in drought seasons and people would even starve to death are today's food baskets.

The cost of living in Kenya continues to rise, and some folks have now taken their frustration from social media to the streets to protest. In the latest, a barechested comedian Eric Omondi led his underwear-only-clad comrades to the gates of Parliament to make their case Kenyans.

The high cost of living, including a sharp rise in the price of food, is a result of one of the worst droughts in living memory, unseasonably hot weather, and the scrapping of energy and other subsidies by a government that has vowed to tame the country’s debt.

The dry spell has hit other Eastern African countries too, but their food prices aren’t as high yet as Kenya’s.

Some of Kenya’s partners in the East African Community might offer it some lessons in dealing long-term with the myriad problems it is facing.

One case is what happened in Rwanda. Parts of the country that were once battered in drought seasons and people would even starve to death are today food baskets.

Over two decades ago, Rwanda took steps to protect water sources and banned any human settlement or even grazing 50 metres from a lake, river, or swamp – and unflinchingly enforced the ban. It also took other actions to bring them back to life.

But perhaps it is what followed next that changed its food security outlook. I just visited an area in Rwanda’s Eastern Province which is a production area of the Nasho Cooperative Society.

Rwanda has a population of over 12.6 million people living on 26,338 square kilometres of land. It is also the most densely populated mainland African country. The pressure on land, and the competition between farmers and herders for it, if often cited as one of the reasons the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi was so visceral.

These realities led it to a land use policy, which has been in place for over 25 years now, and is bearing fruit. It pushed land rationalisation, and collectivisation, akin to an Israeli kibbutz.

It moved people off their individual plots into satellite settlements. It then got them to form cooperatives and pool all their land into big units. The people come from their residential areas to work the land. Most farmers in Rwanda today have to be in a cooperative to farm and sell their produce.

However, though the land is collectivised, each farmer still owns the portion they brought into the pool. Thus farmer Juma Ali might own two acres, Mary Chebet might own one, Tom Mwaniki might own half an acre, and Pascal Ojede might own a quarter of an acre. They plant the same crop after the cooperative agrees, and while you might stand on the road and see a maize garden of 100 acres, bits of it are owned differently. The harvest is done, and every farmer gets a share from his/her portion; the bulk of it is sold for them by the cooperative.

Districts were also divided into dedicated zones for growing crops and others for raising cattle. You can’t have crop and dairy farming, on a medium to large scale, in one place.

In the areas dedicated to raising cattle, the pasture and other dairy rituals are also organised in a similar collectivised way, with the farmer who owns 20 cows doing his thing next door to the one with two.

The immediate advantage of this is that it significantly reduces the cost of production for the farmers, the cost of extension services, and the cost of transport to market because there are big volumes that can be carried once in a huge truck. In times of drought and dry spells like today, this extreme cooperative structure allows the government to intervene efficiently by delivering large waterfilled trucks to a single cooperative for cattle, and five hundred farmers are all able to get water for their animals in that one shot.

This brings us back to the case of Nasho Cooperative. Though not the biggest in the country, it has 2,000 members who grow food on 29,600 acres. In a $54 million project, the Nasho Cooperatives got a solar-powered irrigation facility. Driven by 65 big irrigation pivots, it can irrigate every inch of the farming collective’s 29,600 acres.

Depending on their acreage, the farmers pay a small slice of their earnings to keep the irrigation system running, so in many ways, they own – or are significant shareholders – in it.

The Rwanda government maintains a vast strategic food reserve, and the cooperatives have a sure market of a percentage of their produce bought for the reserve.

The result has been dramatic. Water scarcity for farmers scarcity is a story of the past. And because of the efficiencies and economies of scale, this hybrid system has brought, there are farmers who previously earned $1,000 a month who today can rake in $5,000 in a good month. Rwanda is, of course, very different from Kenya or Tanzania, but it shows it’s possible to sharply cut back on exposure of agriculture to extreme weather patterns.