Kenya blog: Dusty roads and maize farms

Over the weekend we visited Makueni, a market town about two and a half hours drive to the south of Nairobi. Driving first down the main road to Mombassa, then turning off to pass through the regional centre of Machakos, we arrived in Makueni after dark with the crickets signing to us. In the big cities, great poverty nestles next to relative wealth, but the further you go into the countryside, the more poverty keeps its own company.

The next day we met Phyllis Nduva, a community mobiliser, and she took us down a long road made of deep, fine, red dust to a village where the community had gathered to hear about Kenya’s proposed new constitution. The constitution is the big news here, with the efforts of the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns dominating the headlines, and a referendum due on 4 August. I’ll write more about some of the issues involved later, but this gathering was aimed at educating the community about what they were voting on, even if the official ‘Yes’ campaigners turned up later to rally people to their side.

Phyllis Nduva talks to Makueni farmers about what a new Kenyan constitution will mean for them. Caroline Griffin/WDM

With all this going on, the village chief (an official government post) and his assistant chief gave us some time to talk about the impact of the 2008 food crisis on their area. The Makueni region is a dry one anyway (unlike, for instance the Rift Valley area), and the variety of maize they grow here has been specially bred by the Katamani agricultural research station to be more resistant to drought. Even so, after two years of poor rains, local food was scarce, and supplies from areas like the Rift Valley were disrupted due to the post-election violence of 2007. Add in rising maize prices on international markets, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

What was clear, and even more so when we met some of those eking out a living in the area, was that the impact was not limited to temporary hunger, horrific though that is. People had to sell their animals to get a little money to buy the basics. The people we met who did that are still without animals. For one woman that means the milk she used to sell for school expenses for her children are gone, even though the rain has returned and she is now able to grow food again.

The office towers of the City of London seem about as far away as it is possible to get from here. Neither the bankers nor the farmers know much of each others’ existence. But in the search for profit through food commodity futures trading, investment banks risk delivering to poor farmers another crisis from which they may well not recover.

James O'Nions