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    Farm­ing on bal­conies the solu­tion to Kenya's rising food prices

     Kenya has one of the highest pop­u­la­tion growth rates in the world. The present pop­u­la­tion is about 40 mil­lion, but it is ex­pec­ted to double in the com­ing 15 to 20 years. Nairobi, the cap­ital of Kenya, is home to 3 mil­lion in­hab­it­ants, and it has already star­ted ex­per­i­en­cing the dam­aging ef­fects of pop­u­la­tion growth, in­clud­ing skyrock­et­ing food prices.

    Over­de­pend­ence on food im­por­ted from rural areas has been re­garded the main reason for the in­cred­ibly-high food prices in Nairobi. Yet, ex­perts be­lieve that the Kenyan urban ag­ri­cul­tural sec­tor, if well ex­ploited, could help bring down the costs of food, by cut­ting down on trans­port­a­tion costs and re­duc­tion of post-har­vest losses.

    A  study by the Mazing­ira In­sti­tute con­firmed that 29 per­cent of the urban Kenyan pop­u­la­tion is grow­ing crops, while 17 per­cent are rais­ing an­im­als within the city lim­its.

    However, Dick Foeken and Alice Mwangi, in an earlier study, found out that al­though “urban farm­ing was car­ried out by house­holds across all so­cio-eco­nomic strata, poor(er) house­holds ten­ded to be more en­gaged with urban ag­ri­cul­ture.”

    Foeken in his book, To sub­sid­ise my in­come,  con­cluded that the growth of urban ag­ri­cul­ture since the late 1970s was a re­sponse "to es­cal­at­ing poverty and rising food prices or short­ages."

    For ex­ample, Foeken says that urban poverty in Nairobi in the mid-1970s was neg­li­gible: only 2.9% of the house­holds in Nairobi lived below the poverty line.

    But that "between the 1980s and 2000s, the situ­ation changed drastic­ally, due to rapid pop­u­la­tion growth, the on-go­ing eco­nomic re­ces­sion and the ef­fects of struc­tural ad­just­ment policies, such as a re­duc­tion of gov­ern­ment spend­ing, in­creased tax­a­tion, cur­rency de­valu­ation, and in­creas­ing real pro­du­cer prices for ag­ri­cul­ture”.

    Foeken says that it was partly as a res­ult the urban poor get­ting more mar­gin­al­ized that many people turned to urban farm­ing, “to sub­sid­ise their in­come”.

    Cov­er­ing about 700km2, ag­ri­cul­tural con­di­tions are  fa­vour­able in most areas of Nairobi. But the de­mand for hous­ing has seen build­ings rise up at the ex­pense of ag­ri­cul­tural land.

    But it is not yet time to give up on the po­ten­tial of food pro­duc­tion in urban areas. Using such tech­niques as ver­tical gar­dens, city dwell­ers can grow ve­get­ables for do­mestic con­sump­tion.

    “Ver­tical gar­dens” is the name given to crops grown in syn­thetic or sisal sacks filled with soil.

    Ve­get­ables are planted at the top of the sack and on the sides on which small holes are punc­tured. A sack with a volume of 0.1 to 0.5 m3 can take 30–40 seed­lings of kale (sukuma wiki) or spin­ach. The most fa­vour­able crops for ver­tical gar­dens are are leafy ve­get­ables be­cause they keep on grow­ing even after the leaves have been plucked. 

    The only prob­lem with sack gar­dens is that they tend to be bulky, es­pe­cially for people liv­ing in cit­ies, most of whom stay in apart­ments. However, even with  lim­ited space, one can still plant spices in win­dow boxes and other small con­tain­ers-of­ten known as hanging/swinging gar­dens.

    Harun, a car­penter along Ngong Road, makes beau­ti­ful win­dow boxes from wood and metal, at a cost of Sh1,200 a piece. While he ad­mits that his boxes are mainly bought by people in­ter­ested in plant­ing or­na­mental plants, he says they can be pro­duct­ively used to grow food crops. 



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