A section of smallholder farmers from Kiambu, Meru, Machakos and Makueni are on a four-day journey to engage leaders and Kenyans on the ideal agricultural system they envision for Kenya.
Starting from Thika on Tuesday, the 30 farmers will make stops in Machakos, Makueni and Nairobi counties where they will exhibit produce, share knowledge and share seeds with their counterparts.
“We farmers and consumers from around Kenya call upon the government of Kenya and international aid donors to listen to our demands, move away from conventional agriculture and support ecological farming. Conventional agriculture has failed us and will continue to do so as climate change worsens,” reads a demand letter written by the group.
The farmers say they have decided to support each other because they have not received sufficient support from authorities and donors. Instead, a lot of support has gone into industrial agriculture – a fatally flawed agricultural model that places farmers in a cycle of debt as well as reliance on harmful and expensive chemicals and seeds.
With support from The Kenya Biodiversity Coalition (KBioC), Greenpeace Africa, The Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN), the Institute for Culture and Ecology (ICE) and The Kenya Small Scale Farmers’ Forum (KSSF), the farmers will use this resilience journey to showcase and prove the benefits of ecological farming.
Ecological farming not only supports local farmer’s livelihoods, it also, “enhances their economic empowerment and is conscious of environmental stability and builds community resilience to adverse effects of climate change,” says Martin Muriuki, Executive Director, ICE.
The farmers are sure that the solution to address hunger in Kenya lies within the country’s borders.
With the right support, they can feed Kenyans with healthy, nutritious food that is grown ecologically. Ecological farming is not a new practice; it combines local farmers’ knowledge with the most recent scientific knowledge to create new technologies and practices that increase yields without negatively impacting the environment and some of our smallholder farmers are already practising it by building on the traditional agriculture methods based on local landraces and knowledge.
The effects of climate change are starting to bite; the Kenya meteorological services have warned that La Niña is near meaning that many parts of Kenya will experience depressed rains in 2016. There is an urgent need to support smallholder family farmers to practice ecological farming through access to irrigation and access to affordable organic inputs and protection of local farmers against middlemen exploitation.
“The future is in practising agroecology and not synthetic chemical driven farming,” states KBioC’s Anne Maina.
Ecological farming is a bouquet of techniques to produce environmentally sustainable and healthy food for local people.
It is a “proven agricultural production method that has at its core resilience, equitability, food sovereignty, and environmental sustainability”.
At the end of the journey, the farmers will hand over a letter to international aid agencies in Nairobi outlining priority areas in the agricultural sector that agencies should invest into.
This comes just days ahead of the World Food Day on October 16.