Up until the advent of devolution in 2013, several regions of West Pokot including Kacheliba, Alale, Kongelai, Lelan, and Sigor, had one thing in common: the bags of yellow maize that would arrive promptly from the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) storage facilities about two months into the planting season, or when the stores of the previous season’s harvest began to diminish.
Food aid from donors, development partners, state agencies and well-wishers had over many decades become crucial to the residents of these regions despite the significant pockets of onion, maize and beans farming.
While food scarcity affected the better part of the region all the way north to neighbouring counties, it tended to be more pronounced in these areas where underdevelopment had left the populations mired in a continuous struggle for food. So neglected were certain parts of the region that, for example, the electrification of Chepareria Town under the NARC government was greeted with relief and jubilation.
Market days in places like Ortum, Orwa, Kerelwa, Kanyarkwat, Chepunyai, and Morpus were a hive of activity, with barter trade taking place between farmers from the outlying hills where furrow irrigation fed the hillside farms that produced onions, cassava, millet, maize and beans.
Still, for decades, the imported yellow maize continued to occupy a central place in the diets of a population scarred by decades of political marginalization. Yellow maize provided relief to food-deprived households, especially during the drier months and just before the harvest season. The relief food also benefited isolated herders who would move with their cattle through towns like Sigor, Orwa, and Sebit in search of pasture.
The locally manufactured hand-operated maize mill was a rare sign of self-sustenance in a region that before devolution offered little opportunity for advancement. Milling maize into flour using grinding stones was more common—a tedious and time consuming chore often left to the womenfolk.
The first major drought during which food aid was provided to the region occurred in the early 1940s and changed the colonial administration’s policy towards the North Rift region. The drought prompted the colonial government to push pastoralists into the cash economy; locals were forced to sell their herds of cows, goats and sheep to the colonial administration in exchange for jobs and cash.
The locally manufactured hand-operated maize mill was a rare sign of self-sustenance in a region that before devolution offered little opportunity for advancement.
In the mid-1980s, catholic missions and Scandinavian donors stepped in to try and alleviate the perennial food scarcity caused by drought and insecurity, inadvertently laying the grounds for high reliance on food aid. The poorer families among the Pokot would camp at food distribution centres, at church missions and at the offices of non-governmental organisations waiting for food donations.
President Daniel Arap Moi’s frayed diplomatic relations with donors in the 1980s, the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund in 1990s and their impact on the economy, as well as the area’s agricultural systems, further negatively impacted the fortunes of many households in the lower economic ranks. In the 40 years since the food aid framework was put in place, food aid continues to occupy a significant place in the region’s socio-political and dietary conversation.
The available data exploring the rainfall patterns, food security and land use, as well as vegetation cover in West Pokot between 1980 and 2011 shows that rainfall has been erratic. Farmers report declining rainfall, rising temperatures and a shortened growing season that has lowered food production. A meteorological mapping of the region over the last few decades confirms the farmers’ observations, leading to notable changes in policy responses such as increased stocking, crop diversification, crop area expansion, but also a reliance on food aid.
Dependence on food aid is, however, not uniform across the highland zones; Kapenguria and Lelan have a lower dependency rate than regions like Chepareria or the more food crisis-prone areas like North Pokot and Kacheliba.
Being a semi-arid, food-deficient and food insecure county, West Pokot requires constant climate change impact assessments, the study of local agro-systems and their incorporation into the formulation of modern adaptation strategies.
The droughts that followed in the wake of the failed rains between 1999 and mid-2002 proved to be the worst in the county’s history. Recorded levels of crop failure were at times as high as 97 per cent, animal numbers fell and aid agencies had to step in yet again to address the food crisis.
Deforestation is the unintended consequence of insufficient food production. Small-scale farmers cut down trees and burn charcoal for sale to supplement their meagre incomes. Sacks of charcoal by the roadside are a common sight, targeting commuters on the Orwa-Wakor-Ortum-Chepareria route.
Sigor, where trees covered 19.9Kha in 2000—or roughly 10 per cent of the land mass—had lost 378ha of humid primary forest or 8 per cent of its tree cover by 2020, leading to an overall decrease in vegetation cover of 7.6 per cent over that period. This has had a direct impact on the recorded rainfall within an area that relies on rain-fed subsistence farming.
The droughts that followed in the wake of the failed rains between 1999 and mid-2002 proved to be the worst in the county’s history.
In the eight decades since the 1940s drought, food scarcity still afflicts a significant portion of the population of the region. In March 2020, exactly 80 years after the first recorded drought, the national government sent food aid into the county: 150,000 kilograms of rice, 120,000 kilograms of beans, and 60 cartons of corned beef were given out to 31,000 households affected by drought across the county at a per capita ratio of 6kgs of rice and 4kgs of beans.
The effects of climate change and population growth have forced farmers and pastoralists in parts of the county to move towards diversification of food sources. One example is the Wei Wei Farmers Association that was formed in the late 1980s to implement an irrigation scheme that would sustain year-round farming. The project involves 600 pastoralists who have put 225 hectares of land under irrigation, with a potential of 1,200-2,000 tonnes of produce per cropping season that could bring in KSh100 million annually.
Food production remains a key priority and a challenge for the county’s leaders. The devolution of agriculture in 2013 placed the responsibility of overseeing food systems in the hands of local leaders who are engaging smallholder farmers, reviving ageing agro-projects, and establishing new ones. But ten years after devolution, many households still partly depend on relief food from local aid agencies and state agencies to supplement the production from subsistence farming.
The effects of climate change and population growth have forced farmers and pastoralists in parts of the county to move towards diversification of food sources.
In 2021, humanitarian agencies in the wider North Rift region placed the number of those at risk of starvation at about 250,000. Decades of partial dependence on food aid in the county have produced a demographic that sees little need to pursue development amidst a perennial food crisis and the predictable intervention of non-state actors. Poor farmers and pastoralists have come to expect—and have incorporated—relief food into their requirements as their incomes are not enough to meet their food needs, factoring in the black tax and reliance on donors and well-wishers.
This demographic is referred to as the satisfied poor in a theory that combines learned helplessness, cognitive dissonance and the subjective quality of life to map out instances in which certain persons and regions outsource their food autonomy to aid agencies irrespective of the projected size of their annual harvest.
Developed by Geraldine Olson and Brigitte Schober in 1993, the paradigm attempts to explain the satisfaction paradox—why some people who are objectively deprived nonetheless claim to be satisfied with their quality of life. They concluded that “being unhappy with the living conditions and yet ‘knowing’ that all available coping-strategies will have no positive effect on the situation, creates a cognitive dissonance within the individual that he will try to reduce. This reduction can be achieved either by finally using an effective coping-strategy or by the re-evaluation of the perceived situation with adapted (lowered) standards”.
Thus when the long-term structures that shape access to and affordability of food do not present clear pathways towards self-sustenance, poor households may learn to lean more heavily on the relatively more predictable provision of food by aid agencies, the state and well-wishers despite the fact that such efforts are meant to be temporary stop-gap measures.
In the longer run, this reliance on aid may result in deliberate disengagement by some from the affairs of the community. In fact, in recent years, the county administration has decried the rise in idling as a social malaise in the region.
Still, it should be noted that the structure of aid programming can also induce dependence, particularly in instances where the aid is sporadic and poorly connected to the food sourcing and storage needs of the local communities.
One can laud the sustained efforts to alleviate food insecurity in West Pokot—where 57 out every 100 residents struggle to meet their basic nutritional needs—while remaining cognizant of the need to move beyond aid. The local administration has brought together a collaborative team from across several sectors with the expectation that a wider pool of stakeholders will more ably fight food insecurity in the region.
Initiatives such as the pro-active poverty graduation policy are closely linked to the mission of West Pokot County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP), the overall framework that seeks to transform livelihoods through an equitable and sustainable utilization of resources in order to bring to an end the dependence on food aid.
In the longer run, this reliance on aid may result in deliberate disengagement by some from the affairs of the community.
To deal with the social and psychological underpinnings of the helplessness that is driving dependence on aid, the CIDP has placed the focus on food and nutrition security, and on improving equity in socio-economic opportunities by 2025.
Given the current food scarcity and impending crop failure, state agencies must continue to coordinate with aid agencies and well-wishers in the provision of relief food. However, critical medium and long-term interventions need to be implemented to undo the learned helplessness that decades of food aid have engendered in the minds of the poor.
A broke treasury, near-empty county coffers and failing rains means that in the short run dependence on relief food might actually escalate. However, aid providers must begin to robustly debate how food self-sufficiency might be achieved both in terms of availability, access, affordability and nutritional diversity.
It just maybe the right time to start working towards not just ending food dependency but also phasing out the gunny bags and the many emblems that symbolise the reality of dependency among the local farmers and pastoralists.
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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.
