Oral East Africa>Boycott maize, it is a revolutionary act, Part III. At the hut of the story

Orijins

I have always wondered about maize, Kenya’s staple food consumed almost over the entire country, whose quality is measured in the whiteness of its purity and marketing gimmick about vitamins added to fortify the nutrition-less pulp.

If you ask my people about what makes good Ugali, they would differ and find processed maize meal too light, chenga, they call it.

I grew up eating Ugali from childhood, my father like a true Manyala believed if you go to bed without it, you have slept hungry. And so the family tradition was established and at least once a day, everyday, we ate maize meal under my mother’s roof.

I asked her how she came to eat the white Ugali. My mother tells me maize meal was not always staple when she was growing up, they used to eat cassava and sorghum ugali. In fact when maize was first brought to her village in Namalo, Budalangi it was mainly consumed as porridge.

She said she first met the meal in boarding school where the government indoctrinated rural boys and girls on the progressive corn meal qualities and association with modernity. She tells me Ugali was served with beans and administered with a spoon for modern etiquette unlike the cassava and sorghum ugali which was knuckled into a fist, and fed on fingers.

She says the first time they returned home they insisted on eating with their spoons, and pushed their mother to set a part of her shamba for elite ugali for the educated ones.

“For the sorghum, they used to plant with broadcasting method so the seeds would grow very close to each other unlike maize which was planted in straight lines that were easy to plough through, so we even stopped helping our mother plant mtama and opted to tend to maize,” she says.

She also said they stopped harvesting with the sickle and eventually lost the skill as well as winnowing and slowly they became more accustomed to maize.

“My mother used to tell us maize will bring hunger to the village, it was a bad plant since when it was on the farm we plucked and roasted, when it was harvested it was boiled for nyoyo even before it could be stored for the season. With cassava, millet and sorghum, the starch was solely kept for the full season into the next one,” she tells me.

It dawned on me how easily maize was introduced into our dining tables, via education.

White maize

When the British institutionalized maize in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe for the London Starch markets it was chosen for its lack of complexity and need for less capital and technical needs for new settlers to produce.

The most funny thing is that today, the maize farmer is required to almost be a scientist. Mr Denis Otieno of Tegemeo Institute tells me that the maize with sturdy three cobs we often see grown in the agricultural society of Kenya shows are heavily enhanced.

They are hybrids curated with the best germplasm, grown in a very controlled environment and fed substantial fertilizers and minerals.

In the long term for smallholder farmers planting maize is almost guaranteed to make losses if they were to produce with so many inputs baring the vagaries of the Kenyan weather.

This was a fact that was known even to the colonial government. Maize was also being produced in the Americas, its original home and the British decided to invent a market advantage to give their settlers in Kenya an upper hand.

White starch would be valued at a premium above yellow starch. The whole issue of maize is that it cross pollinates and whatever you do on your farm affects mine. And soon the colonial governments were banning anyone from cultivating maize with any different colour.

It was not just the racial profiling of corn that gave the British settlers an advantage in the market, they used free labour which they paid for with the very same produce. As Africans left their farms to work on settler farms, in mines or industrial plants, maize rations were what their employers used as in-kind payments.

Subsidies

But maize was still not profitable to produce especially as Africans began to be allowed to compete with the settlers. The white minority came up with new laws to subsidize maize production for British farmers through buying the grain at a fixed price above the market.

During the 1930s depression, the colonial governments passed the Native Produce Ordinance in Kenya in 1935 creating a state crop-buying stations in European farming areas without parallel investments in African farming areas; which enforced a two-tiered pricing system and enforced protectionism to restrict grain movement across districts.

“Through discriminatory pricing made feasible by controls on marketing, the cost of supporting settler maize production was paid largely by African farmers and consumers rather than European taxpayers, making the system fiscally sustainable,” Melinda Smale and Thom Jayne say in their research.

If this sounds familiar with Kenya’s policy today of controlling imports and creating a strategic reserve through National Cereals and Produce Board primarily for ‘political interest’, yes it does.

When Kenyan elite took over at independence they retained the old colonial elite interests and mostly replaced them with local cronies. The Kenyan government has since 1999 implemented marketing board purchase of grain in politically important areas at fixed support prices, coupled with tariffs on maize imports.

Kenya has structured decades of economic policy and tax money into a project it knew could ideally not be produced at good prices largely because it adopted the grain on the promise of the new technology by western corporations keen on controlling world food systems.

The benevolence of Rockefeller

When British was granting its colonial territories independence it offered its policy transition so as to secure her majesty’s governments continued uninterrupted supply chains. Africans on the other hand did not show much dexterity for finding a solution for feeding their growing population when the Americans show up.

The Rockefeller Foundation had been conducting a research in Kenya for almost a decade and they promised a breed that could yield higher returns only reminiscent of the among farmers in the U.S. Corn Belt during the 1930s-40s.

Released on the eve of Independence, H611, it would have a lower seed cost than conventional hybrids and would yield 40 percent more.

The Rockefeller Foundation and USAID facilitated the exchange of germplasm between continents as well as the sharing of new research experience concerning hybrid genetics.

This became the basis of the new government’s social contract with its people it would provide the food through this scientific miracle. The controlled marketing systems inherited by the new governments at independence were viewed as the ideal vehicle to implement these objectives.

State failure

Initially this produced tremendous results thanks to heavy subsidization both through fiscal allocations and donor funding for research to keep yields improving.

But then came the 1990s and the International Monetary Fund could not believe the economy was running such an inefficient economic system carried over from the British. For the IMF the solution would be to privatize, let foreign capital produce on larger consolidated land at the economies of scale that can support its inefficiency.

The fund used the fiscal crises and increased donor leverage over policy to push the grain marketing systems of Eastern and Southern Africa toward liberalization.

Through the structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s, they ordered the government to cut subsidies, that had supported extension services to small holders and the crucial research for seeds improvement.

The tendency to recycle seeds by smallholder farmers also meant lower yields at a time East Africa was experiencing erratic rains as a result of climate change, which undermined the maize miracle.

As a result maize production has become even more precarious for smallholder farmers resulting in frequent hunger crises, which have in turn proved to be cash cows, for the local political elite.

State interventions in agricultural markets, while ostensibly designed for rural development or to correct for market failures, are meant to serve the interests of a dominant elite composed of bureaucrats, urban consumers, and industry.

Due to the cyclic crop failures, the government retained the colonial two-tier prize model to secure the interests of the ‘political’ interests in Rift Valley. State operatives have also taken to accessing import licenses to fill in the deficit and in cases of crisis get lucrative duty-free status.

Meanwhile, the cost of animal feed continues to remain elevated with the Kenya taxpayer coughing up money for a failed project, for the cost of the failure, and for the cost of the failure in related economic sectors.

Stop eating maize, it is a revolutionary act.