The Famine in East Africa

Somalia has been in civil war for the last 20 years and counting, causing a major disruption of normal day life. Apart from the people who have been killed and injured in the battles, Somalia’s agriculture sector is literally on it’s death bed, unable to feed even a tenth of the 10 million population of Somalia. Fishing along the coast line has died largely due to toxic waste from passers-by and unscrupulous corporations and governments but that’s a blog post for another day, today is Blog Action Day (#BAD11) and since it coincided with world food day (#WorldFoodDay), the topic is FOOD, or in this case of East Africa the lack of it. 

Hydroponics, Aquaponics and Aeroponics

Climate change is a reality. At independence in 1963, Kenya’s forest cover was 10% of it’s land mass but now it’s a greasly 1.2% due to massive deforestation. This has had a huge effect in terms of our water tower and subsequently food security. Apart from the micro climate change, the globe as a whole is pumping out greenhouse gases that are significantly shifting climate and weather patterns all over the world.

Coffee or Real Estate?

Sasini Ltd, a listed agricultural company at the Nairobi stock exchange, surprised everyone by announcing that they intend to turn a 1000 coffee plantation into real estate. This news flabbergasted the market causing the stock price to gain more than 23% on receipt of this news in the stock market the question remains why the excitement at the @NSEKenya.

Organic Farming Versus Conventional farming

This is perhaps the hottest debate in agriculture circles…organic or inorganic? First of all what is organic farming? Organic farming is the practice of agriculture without harming the land, water and people involved. It is the type of farming whereby you don’t use chemical fertilizers, herbicides rather natural and more conserving methods are adopted.

The State of the State

Kenya is a food insecure country, we import over half of our food mostly  from our food secure neighbours which leaves us to question our priorities as a republic. Currently we are suffering a huge shortage of grains like maize, rice, wheat etc  forcing us to import expensive food from Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa etc

Reasons for this are