For food security, failing to plan is planning for failure

Amidst the hopelessness and the blame game over the dire drought situation in the country, I visited Turkana County where I was persuaded that we can begin to change the narrative on food security.

Turkana is prove that there is no reason why people should starve.

In Turkana, the county government has initiated a drip irrigation project that feeds thousands people. Using water drawn from the Turkana aquifer, the local community is growing green peas, maize, beans, vegetables, onions and other horticultural products.

The bountiful harvest we saw proves that some of the most hostile dry areas can easily be converted to food basket areas using simple technology such as drip irrigation.

If anything, the technology requires little investment. Yet most importantly, the case of Turkana County proves that with the necessary political will and proper planning, anything is possible including convincing the mostly nomadic people living in the arid lands to diversify their economies and start farming to cushion against potential hazards such as famine whose spiral effects are colossal.

We hardly prepare for these disasters yet we are warned in advance. Early this year, the government sent out an appeal to request for support from the donor community. At a meeting at the KICC chaired by the Head of Public Service Joseph Kinyua, nearly Sh11 billions was raised "to mitigate the biting drought."

Most of these monies were earmarked for emergency relief services. The expectation then was the funds were enough to last until the long rains in April.

Unfortunately, the drought situation continues to worsen with rainfall analysis from March- April, as reported by the Meteorological Department indicating generally depressed rainfall over most parts of the country including the Western and Central.

In fact, the onset of the March-April-May (MAM) rains was delayed and prolonged dry spells have characterised the season, leading to poor rain distribution.

The effect of that is such that in the arid and semi-arid areas, more than 2.7 million people are facing malnutrition related diseases.

More than half of these are children. Experts warn that the critical nutritional situation for children in drought-affected hot spots in northern Kenya and the chronic lack of funding available to help them could lead to a humanitarian disaster of a scale never seen in recent times.

Close to 400,000 children are facing acute malnutrition. This is more than double the threshold of the acceptable international critical emergencies.

According to the Save the Children by August, close to 3.5 million people will be in need of food assistance or risk starving. Following the prognosis given by the UN humanitarian department OCHA, Kenya is on the brink of famine.

All the indicators suggest we will witness a humanitarian disaster never witnessed in recent times.

Failure to respond, more than 2.7 million people will not access clean and safe water leading to poor sanitation consequently outbreaks of diseases such as cholera. Acute malnutrition and lack of basic food will cause disease and if not addressed urgently, death.

The government and donor community should not wait. They ought to step up funding to the nutrition sector to implement life-saving interventions.

By July, it will be too late to prevent malnutrition and there will certainly a large influx of people fleeing the range lands migrating in search of pasture and water.

As we move closer to the elections, my fear is many are going to get disenfranchised because of movement in search for water and pasture making them not vote.

Even though the prices of some basic food have started to reduce due to the government's efforts to subsidise the food, this intervention might yield minimum results.

A long term solution is in getting more places to grow their own food like it is happening in Turkana.

 

Mr Guleid is the Deputy Governor, Isiolo County

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