Food security is of great importance to Kenyans and reducing food insecurity in the region can reduce global food insecurity since Kenya can produce food even for export.
According to the latest estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 842 million people in the world one eighth of the world’s population suffered from chronic hunger in 2011–2013 they were not able to have enough food and sufficient access to food for an active and healthy life. The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, mainly countries in South Asia, East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa.
There is need for Kenyans to boost agricultural productivity and food production through science and technology. Climate change threatens agricultural productivity because it leads to increase in temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, sea level rise, and frequency and changing patterns of extreme weather events among other things. These impacts are already being felt in some food-producing areas. Consequently there is an increasingly urgent need to adapt agricultural systems to climate change and help agricultural communities become more resilient to droughts and floods especially for smallholders. There is need for establishing a system that can monitor and detect early warning for climate change.
Government should make efforts to increase investment in environmentally sound farmland irrigation and drainage infrastructure and facilitate the development of agricultural insurance and risk management tools especially for small-scale producers who are usually impacted the most and have the least resources for recovery. Governments should also support research and development on seeds that are more adaptive to climate change and resilient to disasters and apply agricultural innovation to reduce the adverse effects of climate change.
Efforts should especially be made to promote science and law and evidence-based approval of new agricultural technologies as well as risk and benefit of agricultural technologies. Adoption, utilization, extension and transfer of agricultural technologies on mutually agreed terms will help to reduce the gap between agricultural research and the need of enhancing agricultural productivity and food production.
Therefore we should strengthen the technical and skill training for rural labor especially smallholders to raise agricultural productivity and farmers’ income. Also adapting agricultural research and development in a way that helps improve output and economic benefits while paying attention to quality and the environment will be of great help. There is need to avoid negative externalities and enhancing overall competitiveness of the agricultural industry through the global development of the food value chain.
All economies should be encouraged to enhance the management of food along the value chain, deepen cooperation in development of approaches to reduce post-harvest loss, promote food saving by raising consumers’ awareness so that food loss and waste can be reduced in the whole process from farm to table.