Our agricultural future lies in the past

Researcher of National Museums of Kenya Patrick Maundu on the steps they are undertaking to ensure the country is food secure.

What does an Ethnobotanist do?

An Ethnobotanist studies the relationship between plants and people. Ethnobotanists study plants to discover if they have potential for benefiting a society. In this way, we pioneer the discovery of useful plant products.

Therefore, in my work I focus on identifying useful plant foods; those foods which our forefathers lived on and survived on. To discover what can be eaten, an Ethnobotanist goes out to study people and check if what they are eating has potential for wider use.

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We harness this potential by getting it from the wild, get farmers to cultivate it and link farmers with the market.

Why has Kenya never achieved food security?

The food we eat is a small fraction of what is available. Our dinner tables only know maize, sukumawiki, spinach and perhaps beans and the like. But what Kenyans should know is that there are thousands of fruits and vegetables available locally.

There are 100 traditional vegetables among the Mijikenda, for example, many of which grow spontaneously where they live. There’s a staggering 400 fruit varieties in Kenya alone. If you go to the wider African continent, there are thousands of fruit, cereal and vegetable varieties. It is mind boggling. 

Unfortunately, we lost our agricultural heritage during the colonial period. The British introduced monocropping, where a farm grows only one type of crop allegedly for maximum yield. The farmer is then supposed to sell this on the market, get money and buy the other foods they need.

This was done so that we can have massive coffee and tea plantations. Maize was also introduced and it quickly supplanted the other food varieties we used to eat. Now we associate food security with maize and ugali.

At the national museum, we have a centre called the Kenya Resource Centre for Indigenous Knowledge. It is one of only 34 such centres in the world. We have teamed up with Bioversity International, the Japanese Government and other partners to ensure that the agricultural biodiversity of our country nourishes the people and sustains the planet.

Agricultural diversity contributes to improved nutrition, resilience, productivity, and climate change adaptation. We work to preserve traditional farming knowledge and traditional food varieties.

Our work aims to ensure nutrition security by going back to our agricultural heritage and returning the lost or forgotten farming practices and crop varieties of our forefathers back to our farms and eventually back to our plates.

Between modern and traditional farming practices, which is better?

Well, monocropping is not good for the planet. It harms the soil because of the need for fertilizer. With monocropping, chances of disease are higher as I mentioned earlier. You need to invest heavily in herbicides and pesticides in order to be successful in the modern era.

In the old days, one farm would have several different types of crops. In one small area, like a village, you would find as many as 60 different types of crops being cultivated. A single farm would have sorghum, vegetables, millet and so on.

This made it difficult for pests to propagate because they couldn’t possibly adapt to all the crops on the farm or in the village. Also, this ensured food security because if one crop failed due to drought, flooding or disease, there was a high likelihood that some of the other crops would survive, ensuring the family does not starve.

It seems that Kenyans are eating more junk food than ever before. Have you scored any wins in restoring the traditional foods?

In the late nineties, Bioversity International teamed up with the ministries of agriculture and health and other organizations to promote traditional vegetables known locally as Managu and Mrenda to supplement the cabbage and sukumawiki available in urban centers. Upon discovering that these traditional vegetables were rich in vitamins and minerals, we used this knowledge to promote the vegetable using the media, agricultural shows and public barazas.

We even went to hospitals and encouraged them to introduce the vegetables into their patients’ diets. We heavily promoted them in our restaurants. The results are clear.

Today, if you walk into any restaurant and ask for traditional vegetables you are likely to find them. It was a many years long effort. The tide is slowly turning. However, it is a battle.

The paradox of the modern era is that processed foods such as pizzas, wheat flour and breakfast cereals are readily available and often cheaper than the traditional food varieties, hence making it more likely that Kenyans will consume processed foods.

These processed foods will raise our health expenditures as a result of increased incidents of obesity, cardiac diseases and cancer.

What else can we do to ensure nutrition security?

Innovation is important. Bioversity International has teamed up with the National Museums of Kenya, county departments of Agriculture and farmers around the country to promote the consumption of puffed grains. An example of puffed grain is popcorn.

The process of creating puffed grains is called popping, which is achieved by exposing the grains to high temperatures. You can pop all grains. This includes millet, legumes, cowpeas and precooked beans, grean grams and millet.

Popping of grains adds value by making them tastier. When you add natural flavours to the popped cereals using traditional fruits such as Tamarind and Baobab, the result is a delicious and healthy snack which children and adults can enjoy. Popping can be used to commercialise the production of traditional cereals and help win the battle against processed foods. We are currently pioneering popping of cereals in various parts of the country and supporting the farmers and entrepreneurs who have taken up this opportunity to succeed.

We also need innovation at the policy level. There needs to be a national policy to encourage less consumption of processed foods, and more consumption of traditional foods. We should spread knowledge to our farmers about simple methods to dry and package traditional vegetables and fruits. We can introduce simple machines to help farmers do this.

When you dry fruits, they last for a long time and can be used to flavor your food, making it both healthy and delicious. There’s also the need for marketing support for these traditional varieties at the national level so that demand can be created for traditional foods.

At the moment, the systems for weeding, harvesting, drying, packaging and storing traditional crops are not there. You always hear the government going to great lengths to procure fertilizer for maize. But there is no national plan for millet, sorghum, managu and so on. This needs to change.

We will continue to sensitize the public, policy makers, farmers and entrepreneurs about the opportunities that traditional farming practices and traditional food varieties offer.  

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