By Dr. Kariuki Muigua, PhD (Leading Environmental Law Scholar, Policy Advisor, Natural Resources Lawyer and Dispute Resolution Expert from Kenya), Winner of Kenya’s ADR Practitioner of the Year 2021, ADR Publisher of the Year 2021 and CIArb (Kenya) Lifetime Achievement Award 2021*
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aims to not only achieve biodiversity conservation but to also mainstream such measures into efforts towards achieving food and nutrition security. This is due to the important role that biodiversity plays in achieving food and nutrition security. Biodiversity mainstreaming is defined as ensuring that biodiversity and the services it offers are correctly and adequately included into policies and practices that rely on and affect it.
Adoption of Climate-Smart Agriculture
Plant productivity varies due to variances in inherent soil fertility, climate and weather, and chemical inputs and agricultural methods, resulting in patterns of biological diversity linked to the agricultural component of economic productivity. One of the ways of promoting food security in the face of climate change is adoption of climate smart agriculture. FAO defines Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) as an approach that helps to guide actions needed to transform and reorient agricultural systems to effectively support development and ensure food security in a changing climate. CSA aims to tackle three main objectives: sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; adapting and building resilience to climate change; and reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas emissions, where possible. CSA is an approach for developing agricultural strategies to secure sustainable food security under climate change. CSA provides the means to help stakeholders from local to national and international levels identify agricultural strategies suitable to their local conditions.
Protection of Pollinators
Pollinators are an important part of the food supply chain and must be protected. Climate change, according to experts, will have a significant impact on insects’ physiology (how they live and reproduce), behavior, and morphological characteristics, as well as their connections with other species (like host plants and natural enemies). As a result, huge changes in insect population dynamics, abundance, and geographic distribution are expected. In terms of vulnerability to insect-transmitted diseases and availability of key services supplied by insects such as pollination and pest regulation, these changes will have both beneficial and negative consequences for people, livestock, and crops. Thus, this must form part of the wider debate in the quest for food and nutrition security.
Embracing Production and Consumption of Traditional and Indigenous Food Varieties
To face the problem of feeding the world’s population of about nine billion people by 2050, it has been suggested that we should consider not just producing enough food responsibly, but also working toward diverse nutrition, which implies providing a good diet for everyone. Traditional dietary patterns are being phased out, which is having significant nutritional effects for rural Indigenous peoples, who are already suffering from nutritional deficiencies and excesses. Traditional food consumption and production practices can help to increase nutritional security by smoothing out dietary transitions, supplying nutrients, and increasing agricultural resilience. Traditional agriculture practices assist healthy ecosystems by restoring biodiversity.
Native foods are thought to have untapped potential to help the 26% of Kenyan children who suffer from chronic undernutrition (which impairs development and growth), as well as the 4.1 percent who are overweight or obese, mostly in urban areas. A lack of established market channels, poor agronomic practices, and limited information about the production, consumption, and marketing of traditional plants have also been reported as hurdles to increasing nutrition status, food security, and overall wellbeing in Kenyan families. As a result, a grassroots strategy is required in Kenya, where stakeholders can perform cooperative plant research and coordinate school, policymaker, and farmer meetings in order to boost productivity and establish an enabling policy and market environment for underutilized crops. Projects like the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition Project, which is funded by the Global Environment Facility and led by the UN Environment Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, are taking steps in the right direction to promote traditional foods in Kenyan homes and schools, and they should be supported and expanded especially within the rural areas.
Promoting Biological Pest Control Approaches
Biological control is a part of a comprehensive pest management plan. It is described as the use of natural enemies to reduce pest populations, and it usually involves human involvement.85 In terms of the quantity of species and agricultural uses, agricultural habitats and landscapes serve as a diversity reservoir (pollination, recycling of organic matter, amongst others). Agricultural intensification, on the other hand, puts this variety in jeopardy. The use of mineral fertilisers and synthetic pesticides, as well as the “simplification” of agricultural landscapes due to a decline in the diversity of production systems, are said to have contributed to an increase in cultivated area productivity. Agricultural intensification has thus been cited as one of the key drivers of global biodiversity decrease, despite the fact that it has helped humanity to feed a growing global population.
Mineral fertilizers and pesticides can degrade habitat quality at the local-field level, while the conversion of perennial habitats (grassland) to arable fields, as well as the destruction of field boundaries and hedges, results in the loss of semi-natural habitats and simplification at the landscape level, including changes in the distribution and supply of resources for many species and the food webs that depend on them. Biodiversity is valued at all scales of the agricultural landscape, from soil bacteria that assist cycle nutrients and decompose organic matter, to wasps and bats that help decrease crop pests, to birds and insects that pollinate high-value crops. Not only does maintaining biodiversity aid crop productivity, but many organisms and species have evolved to rely on specific agricultural environments for their very survival. Agriculture, in other words, both supports and is supported by biodiversity preservation. To this end, biological pest control in arable fields is a vital ecosystem service given by high-diversity landscapes and species rich enemy populations, but it is vulnerable to agricultural intensification.
*This article is an extract from the Article: Biodiversity Mainstreaming for Food and Nutrition Security in Kenya by Dr. Kariuki Muigua, PhD, Kenya’s ADR Practitioner of the Year 2021 (Nairobi Legal Awards), ADR Publisher of the Year 2021 and ADR Lifetime Achievement Award 2021 (CIArb Kenya). Dr. Kariuki Muigua is a foremost Environmental Law and Natural Resources Lawyer and Scholar, Sustainable Development Advocate and Conflict Management Expert in Kenya. Dr. Kariuki Muigua is a Senior Lecturer of Environmental Law and Dispute resolution at the University of Nairobi School of Law and The Center for Advanced Studies in Environmental Law and Policy (CASELAP). He has published numerous books and articles on Environmental Law, Environmental Justice Conflict Management, Alternative Dispute Resolution and Sustainable Development. Dr. Muigua is also a Chartered Arbitrator, an Accredited Mediator, the Africa Trustee of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the Managing Partner of Kariuki Muigua & Co. Advocates. Dr. Muigua is recognized among the top 5 leading lawyers and dispute resolution experts in Kenya by the Chambers Global Guide 2022.
References
Muigua, K., “Biodiversity Mainstreaming for Food and Nutrition Security in Kenya,” (KMCO, 2021) Available at: http://kmco.co.ke/wp-content/uploads/ 2021/12/ Biodiversity-Mainstreaming-for-Food-and-Nutrition-Security-in-Kenya-Kariuki-Muigua-December-2021.pdf (accessed on 05/04/2022).