Act urgently on food security, climate change

It is unconscionable that hunger and malnutrition should exist in today’s world of plenty: we have millions of hungry people on one side of the scale and similar number of obese people on the other.

Many are starving while almost 40 per cent of the world’s food goes to waste on the farm, during transportation and on the retail end of the food value chain.

The real culprit is climate change which has continued unabated and remains a fundamental threat to our global food systems.

Today, soaring temperatures, unpredictable and extreme weather patterns are adversely affecting our ability to feed ourselves, demanding urgent solutions.

With each passing year, farmers are finding it more difficult to predict growing seasons, with unpredictable rainfall threatening crop yields and livestock productivity. The effects of climate change further extend to the oceans, where even our fishermen say they are getting fewer stocks of fish. We must urgently find a solution to this menace.

In Kenya, older people will tell you weather patterns have changed dramatically. I recently engaged a certain octogenarian in Nyeri and he told me that one of the local rivers – named Nairobi for some reason – used to be an all season river. When he was young, he used to go fishing for trout on this same river.

During the cold season however, the river would freeze up in the night and early mornings. Today, the river is a shadow of its former self. It flows listlessly and has almost no aquatic life partly because of its unpredictable flow and due to chemicals from the big farms upstream.

What as a country we need is to appreciate that we must protect our environment. We have some entity called National Environment Management Authority. Like every other government body, I honestly don’t know what the people who work there do for a living except looking the other way as polluters happily go on with their nefarious activities.

I would like to look at their files and see how many people have been taken to court for polluting. I think I might get disappointed to find that it’s perhaps one or two fellows who refused to part with ‘something small’.

But I digress. During the rainy season, we have so much water that some people’s homes sail away towards the sea and they are left homeless. The deluge like we experienced last year can be of biblical proportions. But we should look at such catastrophic events for inspiration to do something about it.

We know it will happen again – maybe this year even – and we should mitigate against it. What would it take to build more dams across the country and provide water for our people? When is the last time we built a sizeable dam in Kenya?

When we build these dams, we can use the water to boost our food production to meet the needs of our growing population. The pressure on our food systems necessitates our farmers to increase our output through more efficient and sustainable practices.

We just cannot pay lip service to climate change; we must act, now. We have seen talk shops held globally on climate change but I would wish they would come up with actionable plans. We must increase investments in renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and clean technologies.

We can lead the continent in this transformation, but we need the right kind of mindset and leadership which I think is lacking. I must admit that we sometimes get some things right, but these are immediately negated by actions (or inaction) that are counterproductive.

For instance, we are a world leader in geothermal energy – number two in the world actually – a clean energy resource but we negate it with the horrendous pollution in our rivers. 

-The writer is a communications consultant