The right to food in Kenya
Article 43 of the constitution establishes Kenyans’ right “to be free from hunger and have adequate food of acceptable quality”. Article 21 provides that measures have to be taken by the state to achieve the progressive realisation of rights guaranteed by Article 43 or required under international treaties. This article looks at how Kenya is doing with respect to its obligations, especially in relation to urban areas.
The right to food is part of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Political Rights (ICESR) and is a fundamental aspect of human dignity. Dignity “does not come from being fed. It comes from providing for oneself,” as a leading expert on the right to food has said. Government’s obligations are to respect, to protect and to fulfil the right to food. Respect means government must not prevent people from having access to food. Protect means it should ensure others do not deprive them of that access, and fulfil means it should strengthen people’s access to and use of resources to obtain food (especially land, supportive laws and extension services). If people cannot access food for some reason, the state is obliged to provide them with food for survival. It must find out which areas and groups are vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition and act on this.
International debate on the right to food
There is a tension between the corporate growth model of food production and the rights of small producers and consumers. In 2012, the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food said millions more are food insecure globally due to economic changes and population growth. Emerging economies need to protect the rights of land users, especially minorities and vulnerable groups. Smallholder agriculture needs protection, while soil and water degradation must be stopped by shifting to agricultural practices that are eco-friendly.
The Committee on Food Security (CFS) – the United Nations forum overseeing policies concerning world food security – includes a Civil Society Mechanism with representatives from all regions including Africa, and from sectors including smallholder producers, fisherfolk, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, the urban food and nutrition insecure, migrants and agricultural workers. Since the 1990s, the Food Sovereignty Movement has promoted the rights of people who produce, distribute, and consume food to control the food system, rather than the corporations and market institutions that have come to dominate it globally.
Key issues currently affecting peoples’ food and nutrition security globally are lack of access to food causing malnutrition, and obesity caused by eating the wrong types of food. Thus rather than simply the right to food, it is now referred to as the “right to adequate food and nutrition”.
Kenya has to domesticate these understandings as it strives to implement the right to food.
Urban food and nutrition
Many residents of African cities live in informal settlements and can hardly afford to buy food. Over three quarters of lower income urban people are food insecure in Southern Africa according to the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), and people living in urban slums are among the most malnourished groups in Kenya, with half the children under three being stunted. Yet Kenyan statistics often refer to urban areas in general having better levels of nutrition and disregard disparities between food wasted in the kitchens of the rich (who consume 3,330 calories per day) and the poorest who only get 918 calories per day on average – about half what they need. Another study found nearly half Nairobi slum households suffer from both adult and child hunger.
Some get only one meal per day and the cost of buying meat, fish or even milk and eggs is prohibitive. The AFSUN study found 96 per cent of the food intake of the urban poor was starchy staple foods. Those among them who were food insecure (the large majority) had access to only five out of 12 food groups measured, two of which were sugar and beverages. This causes obesity and poor health, including vulnerability to the so-called “life-style” diseases such as diabetes.
Forty per cent of African urban households are thought to practice urban farming, mostly to supplement their diet and save on food expenses. But many, especially urban livestock keepers, also sell part of their production, such as milk and eggs, which provide useful extra income. Fresh produce from urban agriculture also contributes to good health and nutrition. Children in urban households consuming animal source foods (ASF) are healthier, indicating urban livestock-keeping is a good thing. Around 20 per cent of Nairobi households farm in the city and seven per cent keep livestock. This adds up to 200,000 households, while thousands of cattle, sheep and goats were counted in the 2009 census.
Most of these belong to middle-income households however. They have backyards and can farm more easily than the poor who live in crowded informal settlements and usually farm in open spaces. Poor people are constantly losing access to a place to grow crops or keep livestock, which means their right to adequate food and nutrition is under threat from competing land uses. Planning urban open spaces for low-income households, especially female-headed households, to grow crops and keep livestock is a priority in realising the right to adequate food and nutrition.
How well is Kenya doing?
Things are moving on the right to food and adequate nutrition in terms of institutional and legislative change. In 2011, Kenya published its National Food and Nutrition Security Policy, and in 2014 a Food Security Bill was introduced in the Senate. The policy outlines a framework for food and nutrition security, and the bill establishes an institutional framework for implementation, proposing a Food Security Authority and County Food Security Committees. Progressive measures included are food subsidies where needed, as well as food distribution mechanisms for deprived and vulnerable areas, to be identified and managed through the national and county institutions. But, notably, land access for food production is less prominent. Also, the language of rights is absent.
A national Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture and Livestock Policy is currently stalled, as is the Food Security Bill, but Nairobi has just passed an Urban Agriculture Promotion and Regulation Act. Other counties are likely to follow suit as the Urban Areas and Cities Act (2011) requires development of urban agriculture plans. The National Urban Development Policy is still being validated through county consultations. The National Nutrition Action Plan 2012-2017 has a budget of Sh70 billion to scale up nutrition interventions by various ministries including health, agriculture, water and irrigation, fisheries development, and national planning and development. But it focuses more on corporate approaches to nutrition than the direction outlined by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food which emphasises small farmers and their rights.
The tension between large-scale corporate investment in food and the rights of small producers and consumers is being played out in the Kenyan context. Despite norms established by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights over half a century ago, and despite the Bill of Rights entrenched in the constitution of 2010, they are seldom used in Kenyan bills and policies. Kenya is not alone in this, Brazil being perhaps the only country to have adopted a rights approach in its “Zero Hunger” policy and legislation.
The authors are respectively Associate and Executive Director of Mazingira Institute, a Kenyan civil society organization which integrates knowledge and practice to advance human dignity for all, common interest of the community and sustainable built and natural environments. Davinder Lamba was global facilitator (2011-2015) of the ‘urban food and nutrition insecure constituency’ of the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM) for the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). This article contains material from an article by the same authors in Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, 2015/Issue 07. Contact [email protected]