Kenya’s harvest shows how to end food shortage

AHERO, Kenya (AP) — Joram Abiero remembers it was not too long ago that his neighbors went to bed hungry.

Now they and thousands of others in the lowlands of western Kenya are able to get year-round work as farm laborers or earn money from their once-neglected rice paddies. The government’s investment in a rundown irrigation project has revived a rural economy that was in the dumps for years.

The discernible change a season’s harvest of rice has brought to the western Kenyan town of Ahero also helps illustrate a message the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has trumpeted this year: Governments need to invest more in agriculture to reduce the number of people who need food aid — one in six people on the globe.

Heads of state and government from around the world gather in Rome on Monday at an FAO summit to explore new strategies. The summit’s top goal is to rally the world behind a change in aid policy and to secure a pledge to spend more money to develop agriculture in poor countries.

Kenya’s program could serve as a model for a radical change in aid policy — getting people to feed themselves.

“When they wake up, there is somewhere they can go and work,” Abiero said of his neighbors Friday as he sat at the edge of the four-acre paddy he’s had since 1968.

At another plot, Erka Adhiambo Okiki echoed Abiero’s thoughts as she trudged through the paddy, pulling out weeds. Okiki said she prefers to work as a laborer in the rice fields, though she grows maize and arrow roots on her own small plot.

Okiki earns at least $3 a day. Importantly, there is work throughout the year.

Ahero rice farmers have been able to sell their surplus to the U.N.’s World Food Program, Kenya’s national food agency, the National Cereals and Produce Board, among others.

Mugambi Gitonga, a senior official of Kenya’s National Irrigation Board that revived the Ahero Irrigation Scheme, says there is a dramatic change in people’s lifestyles.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which is hosting the three-day summit at its Rome headquarters, says the share of international aid allocated to agriculture has plummeted from around 19 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2006.

Only recently has this trend started to reverse, but in the meantime, high food prices and the financial meltdown have pushed the number of hungry people this year to a record 1.02 billion people — nearly a sixth of the world’s population.

Small farmers in the developing world could feed themselves and their compatriots if only they had access to basic items such as seeds, tools, irrigation systems as well as training and infrastructure such as storage facilities and roads from fields to markets, FAO says.

But with food prices relatively low until the spike in 2007-08, government and private investors felt there was less need to put money into agriculture, said FAO economist Kostas Stamoulis.

Money was diverted instead to less- complex and more attention-grabbing projects.

The 2,200-acre Ahero Irrigation Scheme in Kenya offers an example of how a poor nation’s government investing its own money in agriculture, with some outside help, can make farming attractive once more.

The National Irrigation Board revived the scheme in 2005, repairing or replacing equipment neglected for close to a decade and re-establishing contact with farmers. FAO then provided enough seeds, fertilizers and pesticides to be used on 1,000 acres.

Slowly, more and more farmers returned to rice. Last year the farmers harvested about 5,600 tons of rice, says Abdi Ahmed, the project’s manager.

Ahmed says the board now concentrates on running and maintaining the irrigation infrastructure, charging the farmers a subsidized fee for each acre.

The board is no longer involved in production or marketing. As part of reviving the Ahero scheme, however, the government got its agriculture financing agency to lend them money to buy seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.