Pesticides and Food Safety

At the Bayer Annual Stockholders Meeting this week, Harun Warui, Lead Coordinator for Agroecology and Food Rights at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Nairobi, on behalf of the Coordination Against Bayer Dangers questioned Bayer’s vision for agriculture to countries in Global South.

The Heinrich Boell Foundation (hbf) today unveiled the Soil Atlas – Kenya Edition, a publication that presents critical facts and figures about soil, a vital resource that impacts food and nutritional security.

Nairobi, Kenya, December 9, 2024 - The Route to Food Initiative (RTFI), a programme of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Kenya, is excited to announce the launch of Kenya’s first-ever Farmers Resource Guide on alternatives to Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs), a groundbreaking tool designed to promote sustainable and pesticide-free farming practices. This guide is by framers for farmers, offering practical knowledge and tools to help farmers at all experience levels to grow healthy, nutritious food while safeguarding their health, the environment, and future generations.

The recent debate in the Kenyan Parliament advocating for a ban on HHPs is a vital step towards ensuring food safety. However, this discussion needs to be followed by concrete action. Dr. Harun Warui emphasized the need for policies that safeguard both human health and the environment.

Regulating pesticide registration and labelling is not enough; close monitoring on the ground is critical. In Kenya, this is where the food safety chain begins to break.

Inspired by the Netflix documentary Rotten, this issue of Cha Kula by the Route to Food Initiative, highlights the absurdities in our food systems in Kenya, both historically and in the contemporary moment. 

Pesticides have not only become a prominent concern globally but in Kenya today. Proponents of the pesticides argue that they are vital in pest and disease control in food systems, while the antagonists raise alarm about the potential toxicity of these agrochemicals to human health and the environment. The point of contention is the toxic nature of certain pesticides sold in Kenya but been banned in their countries of origin. According to a 2023 Route to Food Report, 76% of the total volume of pesticides used in Kenya are categorized as highly hazardous and 44% of these pesticides are banned in the European Union.

During the colonial era in Kenya, the agricultural sector was overseen by a retrogressive and racist colonial agrarian policy. It split into two main structures that saw the best arable land reserved for European ownership (referred to as the White Highlands) that concentrated on producing cash crops like coffee, tea and improved livestock mainly to be exported as commodities in short supply in Europe.