The News from Kenya: 1. Will this forced marriage be ‘’til death set us part’? 2. The global food crisis and Kenyan farmers.

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Visiting a show of Kenyan dances, the Bomas of Nairobi, I realized how deep the recent crisis had hit the tourist industry here: when the showcase of the 49 Kenyan tribes started, the auditorium, with capacity probably for 1,000 spectators, had exactly…two. A blonde British girl and yours truly. Weeks before traveling, I saw a BBC report on how reservations for safaris in Nairobi, the safari capital of the world, had gone down dramatically.

As little as four months ago, Kenyans were killing each other on the streets, from Nairobi shantytowns to the Rift Valley area. The shameful loss of lives started shortly after the re-election of President Kibaki, under accusations of fraud by the opposition, led by the charismatic Raila Odinga. Both Kibaki and Odinga have been long-standing leaders of their respective political parties. Both are symbols in Kenya. But symbols of a system that sees multiparty politics defined along tribal lines. Here, sadly, it is still common that you support a party because is linked to your tribe, not because it has good ideas for the country. Although the political panorama seems to be way better than a decade ago, when similar violence occurred also after a presidential election.

Well, but my point is to update what is going on, since CNN and BBC do not give Kenya the same coverage as they did a few months ago. Kibaki is President (again, even though he probably did rigged the election) and Odinga, believe it or not his Prime Minister now (!). But they can barely stand each other.

Odinga, though, has taken a rather risky position: he is advocating for amnesty of all the youth involved in the massacre of a few months ago. Politically, he aims to gain the sympathy of those young voters (and their parents) for the next election. But these are not kids that went to protest on the streets against an oppressive government. These are not fighters for democracy in Kenya. These are people that took machetes and raided entire villages, killing and mutilating men, women and children, only because they were members ‘of the other’ tribe, either Kikuyos, or Luos.

Do these politicians intend to send the message out there that what these assassins did was right and just?

2. FAO, Kenya, and the Food crisis


The FAO Regional Conference for Africa just finished in Nairobi, and the result: more of the same. Even though this FAO Regional Conference might have had both more participation of member governments’ officials and more media coverage, due to the world food crisis, their declarations continue to be purely rhetoric.

Meantime, in Kenya’s Central Province, the irony cannot be bigger: farmers are flocking to supermarkets to buy the same food they grow. Yes. They receive meager returns after selling all their production to middlemen, in order to earn some money, only to realize that that money is not enough to feed their families, having then to buy their own production at supermarkets, at way higher prices.

I remember a meeting in DC when it was discussed how higher prices would actually benefit farmers, while affecting the landless poor. But such an assessment misses out all the inequalities in terms of scale of production, technology, land ownership and access to information between the different actors in rural areas. And also misses the fact that the rice producer cannot only eat rice: he needs other nutritional supplements to lead a healthy life, one that every human has a right to. When the farmer goes to a market to buy other staple food, he faces the same higher prices than the landless poor. And don’t get me started on the prices of agricultural inputs, also increasing due to oil prices. Not enough money for fertilizers, means an even more reduced agricultural production.

The consequences of this are already affecting Kenya at the national level: more farmers are…abandoning the fields, reducing the scale of their production, and trying to either migrate to the cities or find a different occupation. Even internationally known Kenya products, like coffee and tea, are starting to see a reduction in the quantities produced and exported.

The end of the crisis, in any case, is not near.

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