Three hundred kilometres north of Mombasa lies Hola, a vast, semi-arid expanse of nearly perfectly flat terrain. As we drive through it, a whirlwind suddenly appears, enveloping everything in a cloud of dust, then vanishes just as quickly.

Temperatures here are over 30 degrees Celsius for most of the year, and the only permanent source of water is Tana River, Kenya’s longest river. Despite the lack of rainfall, the river’s delta is fertile, and has long been the centre of attention for Kenya’s irrigation experts.

Early this month, Kenya sought a new solution to its food insecurity with the launch of a Ksh250 billion ($2.9 billion) million-acre irrigation scheme here in Galana/ Kulalu in Hola.

The scheme could help unlock the potential of the country’s arid and semi-arid lands, bringing 500,000 acres under maize and adding 40 million bags to the annual maize harvest — effectively doubling the country’s maize production.

It would also bring 200,000 acres under sugarcane, a 37 per cent increase on the current 528,000 acres, as well as 150,000 acres under beef ranching.

A further 150,000 acres will support dairy farming, fruit, vegetables and flower farming. The government has allocated Ksh3.6 billion ($42.3 million) in the current financial year for the irrigation project.

On the ground, we see heavy machinery at work, breaking the earth to create channels for the irrigation canals. Four tractors are ploughing the ground.

In a section that was cultivated earlier, there is a lush maize plantation with a crop that is near harvest. It looks as healthy as it would in the Rift Valley, the country’s bread basket.

There’s a muted sense of excitement here, judging from the look on farmers’ faces.

In a country where maize is synonymous with food — each Kenyan consumes 90kg of maize every year — it’s big news, and another one of the mega-infrastructure schemes that have become all the rage in East Africa.

But, in a market with notoriously poor linkages between food-surplus regions and food-deficit regions, and major post-harvest losses due to poor storage and handling, questions are now being raised on whether the grand focus on the supply side of Kenya’s food security equation is really the best way to ensure that no citizen goes hungry.

Lack of income

“Kenya’s problem has never been a lack of food per se, it’s about the lack of income to buy food. Then the price of food is high because of an inefficient food value chain,” said Kwame Owino, chief executive of the Institute of Economic Affairs in Nairobi.

“In general, the scheme is a good idea, but just looking at the production side of the food insecurity problem may not be the ultimate solution.”

But Ephraim Mukisira, director of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, argues that the scheme does have a potential return on investment.

“The scheme is intended to unlock the potential of the arid and semi-arid lands, which make up 80 per cent of the country’s land mass. Other countries, like Israel for example, have turned desert into green land, and we can do the same,” said Dr Mukisira.

Data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics show that just 54,000 acres are under irrigation in Kenya. According to Dr Mukisira, there is an additional 9.2 million hectares (22 million acres) that can be put under irrigation in Kenya.

The disconnect between food-surplus and food-deficit regions has been playing out in sharp relief over the past few weeks: An estimated 400,000 people are already facing famine in Turkana, northwestern Kenya, while 300 kilometres away, farmers in Kenya’s breadbasket regions of Uasin Gishu and Trans Nzoia have had their maize harvest rejected by the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) for an excessively high moisture content, which puts the grain at risk of aflatoxin contamination.

Early January, NCPB acting managing director Cornel Ngelechey said the Eldoret depot in Uasin Gishu alone rejected 30 per cent of deliveries last season compared with 20 per cent in the previous season, a result of heavy rains that soaked the harvest in the fields late last year, coupled with poor storage and handling after harvest. It’s a similar situation across the region.

Studies conducted by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) indicate that the five East African countries lose between 14 and 36 per cent of their harvest to pests and fungi, with the biggest losses occurring at the harvesting and drying stage.

A separate study by the World Bank also showed that in Kenya, the impact of the weather was the biggest factor in reducing the quantity and quality of the maize harvest for both small and large-scale farmers, while in Uganda and Tanzania, pest infestation was the leading cause of post-harvest losses.

High prices

Even with a good harvest, and proper storage and handling, the price of maize continues to be stubbornly high due to poor transport networks and a lack of market integration in the region.

The paper by the World Bank titled Missing Food: A study of post-harvest losses in sub-Saharan Africa indicated that transport costs make up a staggering 76 per cent of the total maize marketing costs in the region.

The relative share of these costs varies from 64 per cent in Kenya to 84 per cent in Uganda and Tanzania, meaning that even if there is surplus food in one area, moving it across the country will increase costs significantly, making the food expensive at the other end.

“Even with increasing production, we’re still going to meet the same challenges if proper infrastructure in and out of the Galana scheme is not put in place; inefficiency will simply be introduced all along the chain,” said Mr Owino.

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A research paper by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) shows that the Galana/ Kulalu area is over eight hours by road from the nearest major market. But Dr Mukisira argues that the Galana scheme is intended to be a fully integrated project.

“It’s not just about production, we’re also looking at improving road infrastructure. All the challenges can easily be integrated in the system.”

The transport infrastructure isn’t the only challenge when it comes to providing enough food for people to eat.

Small scale farmers are often forced to sell their maize directly to middlemen who pay upfront — albeit often at lower prices — rather than to the national maize marketer NCPB, which sometimes takes months to settle a debt.

Only 15 per cent of maize produced in Kenya is sold to NCPB, mainly by the large farms, with the rest sold to middlemen. NCPB guarantees a price to farmers, but because only the bigger farms with adequate cash flow can afford to wait to be paid, the arrangement ends up profiting the medium and large scale producers.

“NCPB’s maize prices end up just benefiting the big farms, and eventually contribute to the high cost of food especially for the urban poor and net buyers of food,” said Mr Owino.

With immediate needs like school fees needed in January, smallholder farmers hurriedly sell off their maize after harvesting in November-December, only to end up buying maize at a much higher price in March-April than they sold it for.

FAO estimates that only 32 per cent of rural households sell more maize than they buy — the rest are trapped in a cycle of producing grain only to buy it for a much higher price than they sold it for.

It’s a dilemma aptly captured in Robert Thurow’s 2012 book The Last Hunger Season, which traces the lives of four typical smallholder maize farmers in western Kenya.

One of the farmers whose real-life story is chronicled in the book is Leonida Wanyama, a mother of seven who harvested a bumper crop from her half-acre of maize at the end of 2010.

She doesn’t have access to proper storage facilities and so, like many small-scale farmers, she stores her maize in her house where its at risk from pests or contamination from aflatoxin. She sells off most of her harvest in January at Ksh26 ($0.30) per two-kg container — prices are low because supply is high.

She is forced to re-enter the market as a buyer of maize when grain is scarce and prices are high. By the end of March, the price has risen from Ksh26 ($0.30) per two-kg container to Ksh90 ($1.05) then Ksh120 ($1.4) at the beginning of May, and Ksh150 ($1.7) by July.

Ms Wanyama ends up paying five times more for the maize because of the cost of food, which has been driven up by a devastating drought that hit the entire Horn of Africa region that year.

Even without a harsh drought making things worse, Leonida’s situation is a common one in East Africa. Thurow calls it “perverse economics” and “one of the powerful forces trapping smallholder farmers in their poverty.”

Additional reporting by Bozo Jenje.