Clash over water sources puts Kenya’s food systems at risk

Ruth Wairimu, a farmer from Gatamaiyu village near Lake Naivasha in central Kenya, has grown greens using waters flowing into the lake for years. But Waimuru is not sure if she will be able to continue drawing water from the lake.

Like tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in Kenya, Wairimu is under pressure from nonprofit groups — that have accused farmers of too much abstraction and pollution — to stop drawing water from natural sources.

Wairimu is not sure whether she is the reason the country’s water sources are under threat but she said she is willing to comply with the nonprofits though this could impact her access to food.

“With water, there is food. I have used it to irrigate my small farm all my life,” she said, adding that this is how farmers from her village have been protecting the local food system from collapse as extreme weather leads to prolonged drought seasons.

Environmental researchers said a lack of consensus between farming communities and nonprofit groups on what is ailing Kenya’s water sources and how to save them is making it difficult to decide on a workable action plan to save water sources while ensuring farmers continue producing food through their established agriculture systems.

Between 80% and 90% of reservoirs and dams are drying up in northern Kenya. As a result, pastoralists are losing their livestock, and lakeside communities are struggling to survive on fishing. Scarcer water sources are also leading to soaring water and food prices, resulting in rising malnutrition.

Nonprofits said increased abstraction and pollution of water sources are responsible for declining water levels and fish stock. But farming communities believe this is a ploy to take away their irrigation-dependent systems.

Japheth Onyando, a researcher at Egerton University, said failure to reach a consensus on the causes of the problem and possible solutions could result in a collapse of the country’s food systems.

“If we cannot be able to take care of the water resources we have, then the next option would be for us to stop reproducing because we will not have food for the growing population,” he said.

During a recent campaign to lobby against threats facing water sources, Maina Kimwaki, the secretary of Wanjohi Water Resource Users Association, a local nonprofit in central Kenya, walked the Journey of Water, which was organized by WWF-Kenya, following rivers from their sources to taps.

His task was to observe the Malewa River from its source in central Kenya to its mouth on the edges of Lake Naivasha. The river is the source of about 90% of water supplying Lake Naivasha, one of the most important freshwater lakes in the country, serving over 700,000 Kenyans.

According to him, acres of eucalyptus trees grown by farmers and irrigation pipes placed at various points pumping volumes of water into the open fresh produce fields, are drying the narrowing river.

In a press statement, WWF-Kenya said the river’s water quantity and quality are threatened by deforestation and siltation, increasing water diversion for irrigation and pollution by fertilizers and pesticides. 

“The eucalyptus trees must be uprooted and farmers stopped from abstracting water if we are to save this river and the region’s water system,” Kimwaki said.

Researchers at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, or KEMFRI, said farming along rivers with agrochemicals such as fertilizers also causes pollution, affecting the water system.

According to Dickson Odongo, a research technologist at KEMFRI, nutrients from the fertilizer cause algae, one of the major plant colonies in lakes, to flower. This flowering blocks sunlight from reaching lower algae colonies. These colonies of algae then starve, die, and begin decaying, a process that consumes huge amounts of oxygen in water bodies shared with fish stocks.

“When fish stocks are denied oxygen to live on, they die,” Odongo said.

But riverside communities insist they are not to blame.

All his life, Mathaga Gacigi, a farmer and village elder from Kirima village in central Kenya has witnessed the region’s water and food systems support each other. To him, the shrinking water sources are due to “an act of God.”

“I do not believe it is farmers who are making rivers to lose their waters. It is lack of adequate rains that has led to the decline of rivers,” Gacigi said, adding that rains started declining and being erratic in his village in 1973.

Officials at the Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum added that Kenya’s ailing water sources are a result of climate change and global warming fueled by fossil fuel burning in high-income countries.

According to Justus Lavi, the forum’s national general secretary, global warming affects the natural system, which forms the planet’s rain cycles. In Africa, disruption of this system has led to inadequate rains and prolonged droughts — a mix that is threatening the continent’s food security.

“It is unfair to blame farmers for all the problems that are affecting our water and food systems because those passing the blame are funded by the same sources who are responsible for worsening effects of climate change,” Lavi said.

Research shows that the amount of rainfall in Kenya has been declining since 1960, and could decline by more than 100 millimeters per annum by 2029.

But attempts to find solutions to the dwindling water supply have also been marred by a lack of consensus. David Musyoki, the Rift Valley basin area coordinator at Water Resources Authority, a government agency, said one solution to restore threatened water sources in Kenya would be for farmers to plant lots of indigenous trees to help restore the moisture cycle within the Aberdare Basin. But farmers are instead planting groundwater-consuming trees such as eucalyptus which are fast maturing and in high demand.

John Mbaria, an independent researcher, said that consensus on managing Kenya’s resources is important and nonprofit groups should work with communities by first understanding the traditional systems they use and then striving to blend their suggested conservation approaches with the traditional ones.

“This way, everybody is a winner. But the biggest winner would be threatened natural resources,” he said.