From right to reality

This year’s World Food Day theme, “Right to Food for a Better Life and a Better Future,” is not just about eradicating hunger but about ensuring access to quality, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food that supports healthy lives. Today, we reflect on the need to invest in the agrifood sector, catalysed by a rapidly growing population projected to reach 96 million by 2050, rapid urbanisation, growing urban poverty and food insecurity, falling food production, and low resilience to climate change. The sector is already facing a higher frequency of weather extremes and fundamental shifts in seasonality, all of which have negative impacts on the right to food for the most vulnerable in Kenya.

The right to access good and sufficient food has been recognised in the Constitution of Kenya 2010 (GOK, 2010), under Article 43 (1) (c), which states that “every person has a right to be free from hunger and to have adequate food of acceptable quality.” This provides a human rights-based approach to food security in Kenya. The definition of the right to food embraces five concepts of food security, including food availability, food access, food safety, nutritional value, and sustainability; it can therefore be equated to ‘the right to food security’. The government has laid a strong foundation through the Kenya Agricultural Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy (ASTGS, 2019-2029), which aims to boost household food resilience through the introduction of climate-smart initiatives.

At SNV, the agri-food sector's strategic mission is to support an equitable transformation to resilient agri-food systems that deliver food security and adequate nutrition for people in all their diversity, while safeguarding the economic, social, and environmental bases for future generations. This connects to President William Ruto’s Bottom-Up Transformation Agenda agricultural approach, which centres on transforming Kenya’s agricultural sector into a more productive, sustainable, and profitable industry by leveraging modern technology, enhancing ecological practices, and promoting agribusiness. Our impact goals are tied to these initiatives: food security and healthy diets, sustainable agri-food production, consumption, and socio-economic participation and empowerment, with a commitment to building strong and resilient agri-food systems that deliver food security and adequate nutrition, leaving no one behind.

The SNV Kenya agri-food systems have adopted a landscape transformation approach, addressing food availability and accessibility challenges for poor and vulnerable populations, including those in fragile settings, and building food system resilience for a climate-uncertain future. We recognise that sectoral approaches have not been successful in integrating people and nature in a sustainable, holistic manner and are no longer sufficient to meet national challenges such as poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and food production. We have therefore taken a transformative landscape approach in our programming, which has the potential to link agricultural production practices, natural ecosystems, institutions, and policies in integrated approaches, providing a basic framework for balancing competing demands for a better future, harmonising the needs of people and the planet.

Article written by David Ojwang, PhD - SNV Sector Leader – Agri-food Systems for Kenya and Burundi