The Contribution of Improved Farming Technologies on Household Food Security
By
Abel Nyasimi Mokoro abelmokoro@yahoo.com
Part Time Lecturer, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Kisii University
Abstract
Food security is a major global concern since food is the most basic human need and access to food is a fundamental human right. The right to food is contained in the universal declaration of human rights that was adopted in 1948 by the general assembly and reaffirmed by the World Food Summit and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN in 1996. To show their solidarity over poverty and hunger issues, nations under the umbrella of the United Nation (UN) targets to halve by the year 2015 the proportion of people who are hungry. Tackling food insecurity problem on a global level poses critical dynamic challenges. Every country has its own individual dimensions adding to the overall food crisis in farming areas. Due to unprecedented subsidies given to farmers in terms of seeds and fertilizers, they are easily enticed to use larger portion of their land for cultivation of food. Consequently, farmers have to either spend more on buying food or reduce their food consumption, which subject their families to malnourishment and starvation. In other words, low level of investment practiced by poor small scale farmers do not attract economies of scales but makes them remain in constant debts and this incapacitates households’ ability to afford adequate food. Farmers being trapped in a debt cycle provide them no option but to keep cultivating this crop irrespective of the long-term, veiled hazardous consequences and questionable economic gains. The power of technological solutions to solve poverty problems currently witnessed in Kenya is installed by the myriad of institutional and supply policies. Moreover, with a better policy environment, investment in rural infrastructure and transport network can bring down input costs considerably by reducing...