Kenyan researchers say traditional vegetables can improve food security

According to Vision 2030, which is a government strategic plan on how to boost growth and development in Kenya, there are an estimated five million out of an estimated eight million households who depend directly on agriculture, despite the fact that agriculture continues to be one of the most under-budgeted ministries. Under the current financial year, agriculture has only been awarded a meagre 3.6 percent of the national budget, which a long way off the 10 percent mark that the government had committed to set aside for the agricultural sector. With an overdependence on agriculture for both subsistence and commercial purposes, a large number of the population is in dire need of food aid. Aid organisations such as the World Food Program (WFP), say an estimated 1.6 million Kenyans face starvation. The situation has deteriorated due to drastic climatic changes, whereby the rains are no longer reliable and most Kenyans are yet to adapt to innovative and sustainable means of trapping rainwater.
According to the Kenya Food Security Meeting (KFSM) - the main coordinating body that brings together food security actors in a forum to map out various strategies to improve food security - while there has been a notable improvement of short rains in severely drought-affected pastoral areas, there have been a general rain failure in the country since 2007, which has resulted in the deterioration in food security. It is against this background that researchers have intensified research on crops that can grow in most parts of the country and which can be used to alleviate food insecurity. This has led many Kenyans to accommodate traditional vegetables that were earlier dismissed as the "poor man's crop". "These vegetables grow easily and for many people they are seen as weed and only the very poor would turn to them for food. They are, however, very nutritious and I grow them on my farm together with the more modern crops like kales," explains Tabitha Njoki, a small-scale farmer from Juja County, Central Kenya.