A scorecard by Action Aid titled ‘Who’s really fighting hunger’ introduces a number of interesting ideas about food security. Released about ten days ago, it goes beyond the question of sustainable agriculture or policy failure to look at whether it is right to see food as a commodity rather than a right.

Faced with people that do not have enough to eat or cannot afford to pay high prices for certain types of staples, governments in most countries treat it as an economic and social problem. The emphasis is on making the commodity affordable to forestall the possibility of social breakdown, unrest and instability.

Kenya has seen this in recent years: Protests by rights groups over food prices were thwarted by police for much of last year until an activist interrupted a State function. Then the Government started bolder measures to address prices. While the State has introduced measures to provide for the vulnerable members of society, most have been to cushion against high commodity prices and increase production.

Addressing the problem from a number of different policy angles, however, will have a better result in the long run. As the Action Aid report points out, hunger was a problem in most countries long before the global food and financial crisis. Those paying the price were children, who are often malnourished, suffer mental and physical damage, underachieve in school/life, and are 12 times more likely to die of treatable or preventable diseases. Interventions like school feeding programmes help, but the strongest solutions have nothing to do with farms or plates.

"Hunger is a choice we make, not a force of nature," reads the report. "It begins with inequality — between rich and poor, men and women. It grows because of perverse policies that treat food as a commodity, not a right. It is because of these policies that developing nations no longer grow enough to feed themselves, and that their farmers are amongst the hungriest and poorest people in the world. Meanwhile, the rich world battles growing obesity."

Changing these policies takes four things: Making a legal commitment to treat food as a basic right; investing in poor farmers; protecting the vulnerable; and in improving child nutrition.

Kenya was ranked with Moza-mbique, which ended 16 years of civil war in 1992, as joint 11th in the scorecard. This despite moves by the Government to subsidise farm inputs and provide vouchers and transfers to the vulnerable. Those that performed best in the survey, led by Brazil, did more than address symptoms.

They "retained — or reclaimed — a central role for the state in agriculture, rejecting the conventional wisdom of the free-market era". Where they have invested in commercial farming for export, they maintained or introduced policies to ensure that production of staple foods for domestic markets continues to thrive. The leading nations also either had "a relatively equitable distribution of land or introduced reform pro-grammes" and introduced basic social protection measures.

Kenya’s approach to land reform is complicated by the fact that 83 per cent of the country is arid or semi-arid. A further three per cent is forest and a little more is woodland, swamp, marsh, water body and so on. Of the land in private hands that is arable, it is the question of ownership rather than productivity that is considered. While wisely expanding the amount of land under irrigation, we are also putting large tracts of unused land under the till. Having massive commercial farms in the Tana Delta, however, will not ensure food security if small scale farmers elsewhere continue to do poorly on output, and land or soil protection. Change in land use, tenure and size parameters can have a significant effect on a good number of failing sectors.

Social protection has its limits given the country’s demographic makeup. The few cannot provide for the many indefinitely. Stretch our resources too thin and Kenya will continue to raise generations of malnourished, sickly children. Striking a balance between radical land reform and pragmatism, rapid or sustainable population growth, and social protection or creating aid dependency makes all the difference.