Move over Covid, beware food crisis

We need a call to arms in Kenya, urgently, that gets farmers, families and every home planting extra food: because we now face a 2022 that is going to move the global pandemic straight off its disruption top spot, by running somewhere between the worst food crisis the world has ever seen, and, of course, the threat of global nuclear obliteration.

For many, the war between Ukraine and Russia has appeared as a far-away and not so serious matter, even as some of us have become very frightened about its escalation and impact. But it is now generating a huge set of food issues.

Russia has been ejected from the global payments system. At the same time, its products have been refused entry or passage by many of the world’s ports and shippers, from Maersk onwards.

This means we can no longer pay Russians for the wheat they grow or the fertiliser or gas they produce, or transport or deliver any of it either.

At the same time, the pulverising of Ukraine in Russia’s ‘special operation’ is not conducive to heading out into the fields in the tractor and planting this year’s wheat crop, due to go in now and imminently.

Between them, Russia and Ukraine grow 28 percent of the world’s wheat supply.

Kenya, which consumes plenty of bread, made from wheat, grows very little of its own wheat (around 10 percent), and even that is under threat, since wheat grown in the tropics needs extra protection from pests.

In particular, ours is afflicted with a disease called rust that requires pesticides that politician Gladys Boss Shollei is working to have banned, which will end even the little we do grow.

Meanwhile, the wheat-basket war has already sent prices soaring and the impact on bread prices is set to be imminent and extreme. Yet if it were only bread, the problem wouldn’t be so grave.

Russia is the world’s biggest exporter of synthetic fertiliser and supplies more than a fifth of the world’s urea, used in fertilisers globally.

The world was already short of fertilisers, but now we shall get very little this season, as every nation seeks to plug its holes – and yet what they all need to make commercial fertiliser is gas, the price of which is also shooting up, on shortages now made much more extreme as Russian gas moves off the menu.

Fertiliser can make a 50 percent difference to yields, so living without it moves us off a wheat shortage to a shortage of everything.

Our own yields will be down, and we will be struggling to import wheat, maize, rice, and all the other things that our needs have ballooned for, but our production hasn’t.

If only we had moved just a little harder and a little sooner on some agricultural self-sufficiency – the FAO has said over many years we have the capacity to be the bread basket of East Africa and even of Africa.

Our crops grow, where we only manage our yields by securing soil fertility and get high yielding seeds that aren’t smothered by weeds, eaten by insects, or destroyed by viruses or fungi, and are then harvested well into dry or refrigerated storage.

But now we need urgency. There are traditional ways of making fertilisers ourselves, so imagine if every media and social media, every extension officer, and local chief’s office, started spreading and sharing all those ways. We make urea in our own kidneys, it is in our urine.

Long ago, turning up to live in rural France with young babies, local farmers told us to urinate on our compost heap and turn it over immediately to capture the gases: fresh from London we were wide eyed, but, a fact, it generates nitrogen and soil fertility. It’s a near-complete replacement for fertiliser.

And as for replacing bread, and rice, let’s plant extra sweet potatoes, right now, in this planting season. And do that hydroponics thing, and the planting in tubs: put tomato plants beside your front door, spinach at their base.

We really do not have to starve this year. But we are going to if we don’t act now.