Mount Kenya rises majestically from the Kenyan landscape, dwarfing all around it, a magisterial monument. The mountain is a fertile giant, but this year it became a killing field for the hundreds of thousands of cattle driven there to escape the fiercest drought in a decade.
John Lenyana used to be a rich man. He left his home in Maralal with over 600 head of cattle when not a leaf of pasture remained, arriving on the slopes of the mountain a full month later.
When I met him, less than 100 of his cows remained alive. His livelihood was disappearing before his eyes, cattle corpses scattered all around him. “I will only go back home when it starts to rain,” he told me.
The rain has now come to many parts of Kenya, and farmers around Mount Kenya are planting again. They are praying for a good harvest this time, because for many it has been two or even three years since the rains fell adequately.
Earlier in the year, in a quarry outside Nanyuki, I found mother of four Pauline Wangoi breaking stones for 50 shillings (about 75 U.S. cents) a day. “Our fields have not given us what we need,” she said. “This is the only way we can make money to put food on the table.”
Drought years have come ever more frequently to Kenya, and indeed to the Horn of Africa. WFP is providing emergency distributions to 3.8 million people in Kenya alone. If they did not receive help, many of them would die.
And WFP hears as clearly as anyone the confused cries of concern from people watching the news on their television sets around the world and who can’t understand why Kenya – and other countries in the Horn – need food assistance, again.
The challenge WFP faces everywhere we work is how to both save lives, and do the kind of development work which means the people we assist do not need us to return when the situation next deteriorates.
We have the tools to make genuine progress. Here in Kenya, for example, WFP’s food-for-assets projects are – community by community – restoring a level of self-sufficiency in drought-affected areas.
Low technology water-harvesting projects such as the creation of ‘bunds’ or dams have a strikingly fast impact. Copy-cat projects are being initiated by neighbouring villages – without the support of WFP or other organisations – as they see how a relatively small investment of time and work can make a huge difference to their lives.
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WFP also seeks to buy as much food as possible for our operations from local markets in the developing world, in the process stimulating production and the reinvestment of profits in agricultural infrastructure, bringing with it the promise of greater food security in the future.
While always working to ensure our purchases do not have a negative impact on local markets, 74 percent of WFP’s food purchases in the first six months of 2009 were made in the developing world – a value of U.S.$532 million. Over a million tons of food was purchased in Africa last year.
We are also working on a pilot project called Purchase for Progress (P4P) in 21 countries around the world, which is working to better connect smallholder and low-income farmers to markets by actively engaging them in supplying food to our operations.
More and more, where the conditions are right, WFP is distributing cash or vouchers instead of food. We did so in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. A project in Burkina Faso is providing support to the urban poor, and in Syria, WFP has recently started delivering cash vouchers to Iraqi refugees via mobile phone text messages.
There is a virtuous cycle in these projects with the endgame always to improve national food security in the countries where we work. Of course, it is not a perfect solution. Climate change, natural disasters, population growth, the ups and downs of global financial markets, high food prices, conflict – all work to reset the clock from time to time.
In places like Kenya and the Horn of Africa it certainly makes our job harder, but not impossible.
Marcus Prior is the World Food Programme's east African spokesperson.
