Posted on February, 24, 2022 at 08:56 am
As Nairobi prepares to host the fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly, Kenyan pressure groups are demanding an end to unsafe food from the country’s markets and farms.
The country’s National Food And Nutrition Security Policy sets out actions to address food safety concerns, such as products that are substandard, laced with chemicals, or contaminated. But environmental and food activists said these have yet to be implemented.
According to research by Consumer Grassroots Association, a Kenyan nonprofit, pesticides not only pose a health risk to consumers but also threaten the farmers who are exposed to them. In a CGA survey of Kenyan consumers last year, 87% of respondents identified pesticide use and misuse as major food safety concerns.
“Kenyans are concerned about the safety of the food they are consuming, and they are worried that the respective county governments are not doing enough to guarantee a response to the issue,” Dennis Adison Ouma, the founder of Fit and Healthy Citizen — a food, health, and wellness consultancy — said during a virtual discussion presented by CGA last week.
Lobbyists estimate that at least 32% of pesticide active ingredients that are registered with the government and sold in Kenya have been withdrawn from the European market amid fears of impacts on human and environmental health.
“Healthy foods begin from healthy soils, water, air, and the environment. Food cannot be safe if it is produced in an unhealthy environment,” Ouma said.
In 2019, pressure groups led by the organization Route to Food issued a petition to the Kenyan government demanding the removal of harmful agrochemicals from the country’s food system.
The government responded by referring the issue to the parliamentary health committee, which gave the Pest Control Products Board 90 days to undertake an analysis of these pesticides with the aim of issuing a ban, according to Claire Nasike, a food campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, which launched a followup petition in 2021.
Though the health committee assembled a task force to review these pesticides, Nasike said nothing else has been done since then.
“There has been some action around the petitions but not as fast as we would have liked as Kenyans. We are hoping that maybe this year the government can actually make a move and ban some of these pesticides that have been proven to be harmful,” she said.
The World Health Organization estimates that 600 million people fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420,000 die each year globally. Africa has the world’s highest per capita incidence of food illnesses, causing 91 million cases annually.
Alice Kemunto, the director at CGA, said that about 137,000 people in Africa die every year due to food-related illnesses.
“Kenyans are a worried lot when it comes to choosing what to consume,” she said. “They are not sure of how safe their food is … because research has proven that they contain high levels of harmful residue.”
Source: Devex