It is hard to remember any decision that has harmed Kenya as much as the recommendation now before Parliament that it adopts the European Union’s policies on agricultural inputs and phases them out. In fact, as the latest and most disastrous move by health policymakers to take over the country’s agricultural policy, it is an overreach where ignorance could cost us 20 per cent of our GDP, as well as countless lives.
There is nothing about the recommendation from the Parliamentary Committee on Health to indicate it has examined the policies it wants introduced, or understood them, or assessed the impact on Kenya. Nor has it mentioned why the rest of the world – including Kenya itself - has moved to the WTO seeking the overturning of the very same policies, or why the African Union has, until now, unanimously rejected them.
The committee has instead recommended that Kenya sets aside the risk assessment methods used globally and the standards set by the World Health Organisation and the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, to ban any product that is banned in the EU.
What the committee does not appear to have realised is that Europe has abandoned science-based assessments, and these bans are not about food safety. They are part of a comprehensive EU strategy to slash agricultural inputs – now by a further 50 per cent cut in pesticide use and 20 per cent in fertiliser use.
Indeed, WTO petition No 382 has seen 45 countries, including Kenya, asking the EU to provide evidence of any food safety issue in these moves. In seven years of demands, the EU has never done so. For in its political drive to be ‘green’, the EU has adopted two changes that mean it has abandoned inputs without scientific cause.
The first is the ‘precautionary principle’, which means it is banning products with no evidence they are unsafe, just in case they might be, despite nine years and 100 rounds of tests showing they are not. Europe has also abandoned the risk assessment methods developed by the world’s food safety regulators and moved to something called hazard assessment.
Risk assessment measures any risk from a product and looks at exposure. But hazard assessment only looks at anything that can be dangerous in a product. So, water would fail a hazard assessment: it can scald and cause death by drowning. Bleach would also fail, as drinking it can kill you. In fact, almost every medicine and every chemical and substance known to man present some kind of hazard, if wrongly used.
Europe has been steadily eliminating pest control products with these new methods.
However, that has also played to a rising problem in Kenya, where health experts are claiming agricultural policy as their domain without agricultural knowledge or even the will to consult the Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture. The committee surely would have mentioned that the EU policies were being disputed in every international organisation in the world.
As a result, this anomaly now sees Kenya petitioning the WTO to reject the same policies that the Health committee has recommended Parliament adopts. I don’t believe the committee has moved to have us withdraw our WTO case: it just didn’t know about it, which must surely count as a woeful breakdown of government, and a constitutional issue that needs addressing.
Yet it is a skid that we will address. We will either wake up and decide the EU policy needs examining before we adopt it. Or we will adopt it and lose most of our controls on malarial mosquitoes, 80 per cent of our tomatoes, which account for one-eighth of all our vegetable production, as well as around 70 per cent of our maize, nearly all our wheat, most of our potatoes, and over half our coffee production.
Sooner or later, the health committee will face a recount on this agricultural policy it has swallowed without due diligence or ground because too many people will have died.
CEO, Fresh Produce Consortium Kenya
