Western Producer reporter Barry Wilson is visiting parts of Africa to report on how people are dealing with the food crisis.
NAIROBI, Kenya – Margaret Akinyi Wagah spends much of her time analyzing poverty and its impacts in this potentially rich East African country and in her home city of Nairobi.
Wagah, a professor at Kenyatta University and national co-ordinator for the food instability research network Kenya Renewal, describes a stark scene.
A significant majority of Nairobi’s more than three million residents live on less than $2 per day and perhaps a million on $1 per day. Most of them live in squalid slums that stretch for miles.
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Meanwhile, a middle class flourishes and the super rich flaunt their wealth with limos and baubles while living in protected exclusive areas.
Sharply rising food and fuel prices have made the situation much worse for the
poor, swelling their numbers and giving them fewer options for survival.
“It is like we are sitting on a time bomb and any incident could set off an uprising,” she said.
“They have nothing to lose.”
While the affluent of Africa and North America feel modest effects from the runup in grain and other commodity prices, the poor feel greater effects because their diets are based on commodities rather than processed food.
The relatively affluent in Nairobi are increasingly apprehensive, worrying about robbery or violence on the street as they walk or drive. Crime is a constant urban companion and visitors are warned not to walk on thestreets after dark.
Add in the still-unresolved ethnic political tensions that led to riots and thousands dead and displaced after disputed elections late last December and Akinyi says she feels like she is sitting on a powder keg.
“This is a place of great inequity,” she said. “Any government that does not heed the food needs of its people is violating a basic human right and is creating volatility,” she said.
“A hungry man is an angry man.”
At the World Food Programme head office in Rome, eastern Africa regional director Mustapha Darboe said food prices that have soared by more than 40 percent this year are creating a catastrophe. The WFP delivers food aid to 2.7
million people in Kenya, including more than 200,000 refugees and 1.2 million children.
“Often, the WFP meal is the only one they get,” he said.
“Many have had to reduce the number of meals they eat, skip a meal, eat every other day. It is a growing disaster. The effect of the soaring food price is to limit access to food. It is not just supply but the ability to buy.”
The political instability has not helped.
Ethnic violence in early 2008 after what many considered a tainted election result drove thousands of Kenyan farmers off their land, many in the Rift Valley that is considered the breadbasket of the country. It means food supplies will be tighter than normal and is blamed for double digit increases in prices.
One of Wagah’s professional roles is to be part of research into the connections between poverty and the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
She said there is a close correlation. Poor and hungry people are more susceptible to disease as their immune systems collapse, and in increasing numbers, poor women engage in risky sex to earn money to feed their families.
“It is a tragedy, but women have said they will do what they have to to feed their children rather than watch them get sick and die,” she said.
Kenya has millions of AIDS orphans and the disease continues to take its toll in urban slums and poor rural areas.
In her personal life, Wagah is far from the world of the slum dwellers, but she offers a personal anecdote.
She is having a house built “and that means you employ cheap labour to do the work.”
She pays them more than $4 per day but the work is sporadic and her workers tell her that after a day or two working for her they may be days without another job.
The $4 has to stretch far at a time when the price of a kilogram of corn meal has doubled in the last several years to $1, sugar has doubled to $2 and cooking oil has increased many times in value.
“That money simply doesn’t buy food for a family for more than a day or two and that does not count rent, education for their children, care for the sick,” she said.
“This simply is not sustainable. I believe the pressure is building.”
