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A few weeks back, Narok senator Ledama Olekina stood before his peers in the Senate and proceeded to make the most extraordinary statement: he had recently visited France where he had discovered the price of diesel at the pump to be at the equivalent of 370 shillings, from which observation he concluded that the lot of the French was vastly worse than that of Kenyans who are “either a spoilt lot or very lucky, because we complain about everything”. Either Senator Olekina’s grasp of basic economics is tenuous (at best) or he was wantonly insulting Kenyans’ intelligence. I would hazard it is both. Which is not to deny that France is in bad shape.
When he first took the presidency in May 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron (who shares with Kenya’s William Ruto more than a penchant for rule by edict) brought with him from his tenure in investment banking the conviction that politics could be reduced to management and that social protection and market efficiency could, at his urging, become willing bedfellows. It hasn’t worked; Macron’s promise of a technocratic, post-ideological France in which the traditional left-right political cleavage would be replaced by a radical centre of his forging has not held. Instead, in the time that Macron has been president, the French billionaire class has more than doubled its wealth while life for the ordinary worker has become harder, and for the retiree, bleak, with elderly pensioners subsisting on meagre pensions visiting supermarket dustbins to scrounge for produce whose sell-by date is past.
But in less than a year from now, France will have a new president, and the next occupant of the Elysée Palace could very well be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose France Unbowed (La France Insoumise – LFI) political formation is proposing nothing short of a revolution to wrest political power from the capitalist class – la bourgeoisie – and place it back in the hands of the people.
Mélenchon’s campaign manifesto, A Common Future, pledges to review, among other policies, French agricultural policy which he says has led to la malbouffe, the consumption of cheap overprocessed foods that has resulted from the industrialization of food production and that is now a public health concern, particularly among those living in poverty, which is one in seven people in France.
Caught in the middle are French farmers who, faced with increased energy and fertilizer costs amid stiff international competition and constraining European Union norms under an increasingly neoliberal EU Common Agricultural Policy, are gradually being forced to yield even more ground to the very factory farming methods practised by agribusiness giants that produce nutrient-depleted foods and are nefarious to the environment. In hock to the banks for loans taken to modernize infrastructure and equipment and gasping in the chokehold of the food giants that dictate prices, individual French farmers extract tiny profit margins, with 17.4 per cent of them living below the poverty line (France’s minimum wage is just over €1,400). Twenty-five people on average commit suicide in France every day; two of those are farmers.
There were seven million farmers in France at the end of the 1939–1944 war. A change in French policy in the post-war period promoted land consolidation and intensive export-driven mass production and today there are just under 400,000 farmers left. The recent signing of the EU-Mercosur trade deal that will allow imports of cheaply produced agricultural goods from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay does not augur well for French farming. The deal will remove tariffs on 90 per cent of goods moving between the two regions, potentially saving the EU some US$4 billion in export duties annually, but also potentially pricing out French beef and poultry farmers. Once the bread basket of Europe, the country’s agricultural sector is in steady decline and, in 2025, France was for the first time in nearly a decade a net importer of agricultural products.
As in all other areas of French life where Mélenchon is proposing to place citizens and their wellbeing at the centre of public policy, he is proposing to put back the farmer at the heart of the country’s food production. Mélenchon has argued that France’s food sovereignty cannot be abandoned to the forces of the free market and that the paysan must regain his place as the guarantor of the country’s food security under a protectionist agricultural policy that will privilege small farmers and local production.
In arguing for protectionist measures in the agricultural sector, Mélenchon decries the factory farming methods whose heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides has led to soil and surface water pollution, is decimating biodiversity, has exposed French farmers to high rates of certain cancers linked to the use of pesticides, and left the French carrying forever chemicals (PFAS) in their bloodstream.
But nowhere are the devastating effects of the French adoption of industrial agriculture for maximum yields and maximum profits better illustrated than in the French overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique where the decades-long use of chlordecone – a highly toxic pesticide – in the islands’ banana plantations has durably contaminated the islands’ soil and water. In what can only be described as a colonial attitude, French authorities in faraway metropolitan France continued to authorize the use of chlordecone in the two territories well into the ’90s and long after the World Health Organisation had classified the pesticide as a carcinogen in 1979. Today, 90 per cent of the population of the territories carries traces of chlordecone in their blood and the islands have the highest levels of prostate cancers in the world. After twenty years of litigation, there are to be no criminal investigations, a Paris court has ruled. It will take seven centuries for the chlordecone to clear from the environment.
Meanwhile, the French national assembly recently voted the resumption of the use of two pesticides that had been banned in France but whose use is authorized by the European Union. This retrogression constitutes a significant setback for the country’s objective of halving pesticide use by 2030. France is the largest consumer of pesticides in all of the EU.
In Kenya, the small-scale farmer is at the heart of the country’s food production, consistently outperforming the large-scale commercial farmer by producing 80 per cent of what Kenyans eat on between one and five acres of land. Agriculture is rural Kenya’s main source of employment, occupying 70 per cent of the population whose production represents 20 per cent of GDP and 65 per cent of export earnings.
However, the Kenyan farmer has also been groomed into relying heavily on dangerous synthetic pesticides that “have been linked to chronic illnesses including cancer, kidney and liver disease, diabetes, and developmental disorders”, as a study released in January this year by the Centre for Environment Justice and Development (CEJAD) reports. CEJAD is not the first organization to report such findings. A November 2025 report by the Kenya Organic Agriculture Network titled “Poison for Profit: EU Double Standards Harming Kenyan Farmers and Ecosystems” decries the impact of the hazardous pesticides exported by EU companies into Kenya. In September 2023, the Heinrich Böll Foundation released a report titled, “Toxic Business: Highly Hazardous Pesticides in Kenya”.
If we can learn from the mistakes of industrial agriculture instead of replicating them, if Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture could shake off the agrochemical lobby that hovers over it, promoting harmful chemicals that put the health of Kenyans at risk and destroy the environment, and instead aim to fulfil its avowed commitment to agro-ecology by adopting tried and tested methods that are adapted to the small-scale farmer, Kenya might yet escape the worst of the human and environmental depredations wrought by industrial agriculture in countries like France while securing her food sovereignty. We must guard against becoming the next Guadeloupe and Martinique.
The shortcomings of the neoliberal capitalist ideology as a model for human development are daily laid bare for all to see; it is a model that has not been demonstrated to be working for the benefit of the majority anywhere in the so-called first world whence it came. Yet, and as Dr Wandia Njoya observes, “We are still looking for answers in the global hegemon that is collapsing.”
We need not reach beyond our borders for “ready-made” solutions to our development challenges but we can certainly borrow ideas when they are inspirational and one such is LFI’s establishment of the Institut La Boétie, which serves as the movement’s ideological laboratory and research centre, producing economic frameworks and counternarratives, and providing training to equip members and activists with political and theoretical tools. As Dr Wandia Njoya says, “We have to think of [the] system [we are in] and we have to think of the philosophical reasons underlying that system.”
In recentring the citizen in the development of our social and economic policies, we are not without resources. The People’s Transformative Agenda for Kenya 2021–2050 could form the basis for deepening our thinking on every aspect of our national life. In doing this, we must call on our sages, our philosophers, our experts, our professionals in every field, and we must leave the door open for every Kenyan to contribute their thinking to how our own homegrown model of social and economic development might look like, and how we might put it to music.
We too can forge our uniquely Kenyan way to the Kenya Tuitakayo.
