Back to the Land, Warily
As Food Crisis Looms, Displaced Kenyans Return With Army Escort

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

NEAR CHERANGANY, Kenya -- In the fertile Rift Valley region last week, convoys of army trucks began returning thousands of farmers to their fields.

Deep in the rolling green hills, the new arrivals -- some willing, some not -- pitched white tents alongside abandoned rows of dried-up corn. Protected by police armed with AK-47s, they began clearing weeds and hoeing the dirt.

"The government has told us to come back to cultivate our land," Theresa Matei said as the sun set on her first day back at the farm -- land that local militiamen had chased her from in January. "They gave us two blankets, just only two. And they've given us seeds, but no fertilizer. We will see what happens next."

The advent of farming under armed guard in Kenya is the result of this country's recent post-election political crisis colliding with a global food crisis that has already driven up the price of corn -- the staple of the Kenyan diet -- about 30 percent in recent months as the cost of fertilizer has nearly tripled.

After Kenya's disputed presidential election in December, local militiamen drove hundreds of thousands of farmers from their homes across this western region, leaving thousands of acres abandoned as the farmers languished in camps for the displaced.

At the same time, most active farmers are planting only about half their fields because of the high price of fertilizer, so that altogether, at least one-third of Kenya's farmland is idle.

Independent Kenyan agricultural experts predict that current stores of corn will be gone in a matter of weeks and that the next big harvest, beginning in October, will produce only half the usual yield. This will leave Kenya dependent on imported food, the cost of which is skyrocketing as global demand far exceeds supply.

Faced with a cascading disaster, officials are approaching the task of resettling the displaced farmers with a new -- some say reckless -- urgency.

Realizing that many of those displaced may be terrified of returning to the farms where they were attacked, the government has begun providing armed escorts, along with seeds and hoes. In a deal with the government, a Kenyan bank will soon provide loans to small-scale farmers.

Some experts say, however, that the initiative will barely begin to address a deeper problem that the political crisis has only exacerbated: a chronic corn deficit that has worsened each year as Kenya's population has risen, leaving the country increasingly vulnerable to the vagaries of the global marketplace.

"Kenya has been caught with its pants down," said James Nyoro, executive director of the Tegemeo Institute, an agricultural research organization in Nairobi, which is predicting a "major food crisis" by August.

Both Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and newly appointed Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who agreed to share power after a bitter election both claimed to win, have urged people to return home. Officials responsible for the resettlement program did not return calls seeking comment.

Meanwhile, the army trucks loaded with farmers are headed to areas where the difficult task of reconciliation has barely gotten underway, and many people worry that the returnees will be chased away again in coming months.

"Peace does not come because police are there -- reconciliation is a process and we need more time," said Joseph Mwangi, a pastor and chairman of a camp in Cherangany, where about 500 people headed back to their farms last week. "But if they're not on their farms now, we'll not have food in 2009. We need them to go back and start planting."

It was around 3 p.m., and people in the last group that day to head home were rolling up the white tents where they have lived for the past five months. They packed up the new hoes and the government-provided seeds -- intended to provide a crop in three months rather than the usual nine -- and heaved it all onto an idling army truck.

Though there were people who were happy to be going home, Agnes Kerubo was not one of them.

Like others, she had not been back to her farm since she was attacked in daylight by neighbors with bows and arrows and machine guns, people she once trusted and who still live just a five-minute walk from her place.

She had a week's worth of yellow peas and corn flour rations and a couple of burlap sacks of belongings.

"I don't have a house, because they burned it down," Kerubo said, adding that there was one reason the politicians who had abandoned them for months were now paying attention. "They are pressuring us to go and cultivate because our area is the central source of food."

"We are late" for planting, she said. "But we will try."

She climbed into the truck with a few dozen of her neighbors. As people from the camp waved, the farmers headed away on an orange dirt road into the green hills of the Rift Valley, which by themselves tell the story of the dire predicament.

The truck passed fallow field after fallow field, acres that should be waist-high with corn by now. It rumbled by land just tilled, perhaps two months late, and farms half planted and half weedy. There were crumbling remains of burned houses along the way, and clusters of young men who did not wave but just stared as their returning neighbors passed.

At the top of a hill, the truck finally stopped at the old colonial farm called Geta. The farmers, originally from a different region, had bought it as a collective decades ago.

They paused a moment to pray, then Agnes Kerubo and the others climbed out.

Edward Orandi, who had arrived on his own a month earlier, walked up the road to greet them. "Welcome, welcome," he said as they unloaded jerrycans, washbasins and burlap sacks.

"It's good to be back home," said Henry Momata. Others shook hands and exchanged news with Orandi.

Orandi had already pitched his tent and started farming, albeit only half his field. He said he thought that security was adequate and that things would be okay.

But as Karen Mumanyi walked down the dirt path to her farm for the first time since January, passing through smashed gates and into the charred ruins of her house, where bits of a white tea set were scattered on the floor, she was not thinking much about farming.

"I'm scared," she said. "I'm at the boundary."

The boundary was the line of bushes at the edge of her plot. Beyond it was the local market, a row of one-story shops where in better days people from Geta farm, who come from the Kisii tribe, traded corn and other vegetables with the neighboring community of Kalenjins, who have tended to consider the Geta farmers outsiders on their traditional land.

According to Mumanyi and others, the militiamen that attacked them came from just across the boundary, where people were now sitting outside shops in the late afternoon.

Not one of them came to greet the new arrivals.

Later, Edward Lagat, a Kalenjin, said that although he had no problem with his neighbors, he was certain that others in his community remained bitter. He also noted that there is a brewing jealousy among Kalenjin farmers who are facing their own difficulties and believe that their Kisii neighbors -- always perceived as favored by the government -- are once again getting special treatment.

"The government has to provide people here with seeds and fertilizer," he said, sitting in the shade of a shop. "They have to treat people equally."

But for Elias Kampoi, 25, the old political grievances over land and favoritism -- stirred up by local politicians during the election campaign -- were fading as the prospect of hunger loomed.

"We are still saying this land belongs to Kalenjin," he said without much enthusiasm. "But we are worried that there will be a shortage of food. We shall not have enough."

Five months after Kalenjin and other militias wreaked havoc across the Rift Valley, he had decided, he said, that "it was not worth it."

"There is no gain," he said. "All of us have lost. We haven't farmed, and they haven't farmed."