Food Aid and Food Sovereignty among the Pokot of East Pokot District, Baringo County, Kenya

Abstract

This study focused on Food Aid and food sovereignty among the Pokot of East Pokot district, Baringo County of Northern Kenya. Food aid by the colonial government was a reality in East Pokot as far back as 1930s. Civil societies/NGOs also joined in making this exercise a perennial phenomenon in this region to date. The study established the traditional coping mechanisms of the Pokot; examined the effects of food aid on the attitude and practice of the people towards their own food sovereignty and determined the people’s perception of environmental changes with regard to their access to and consumption of wild fruits and animals found locally as a current safety net measure. The study embraced the Rational Choice Theory also known as Rational Action Theory (RAT), which postulates that all humans are rational as they make decisions and the respondents were found to be purposeful as they made food related choices. Multistage sampling, simple random sampling and purposive sampling techniques were used with the household as the unit of analysis. Krejcie and Morgan tables were used to determine the sample size of 169 heads of household and key informants from Mondi and Nginyang Divisions. The data were collected using semi-structured interview schedules, and focus group discussions, coded and analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and thematic analysis. This study found out that: food situation was very bad before food aid; traditional coping mechanisms are currently seen as irrelevant; goats and camels were preferred; food aid was still being supplied and people were very happy, healthy and had high fertility; East Pokot could not be food sovereign perceptively; the future food situation was very desperate thus respondents were ready to do business, farming, and education to cope; environment has changed significantly; some wild foodstuffs were extinct and there were also new-arrivals like prosopis fujiflora and cactus; camels also though domesticated were adopted from the neighbouring Turkana people. This study recommends that Food aid providers give food sovereignty priority over food aid per se; meat production projects be established with expanded livestock marketing; commercial domestication of cactus for jam production; social support systems initiated to boost the people’s purchasing power; positive aspects of indigenous knowledge be incorporated into the food sovereignty strategies; the traditional environmental controls and modern methodologies be used together; and deliberate measures to plant traditional trees like Sorich, loma, mwarubaine and the like be put in place.