WESTERN PROVINCE, Kenya — In the 44 years Naomi Rita Sitati has lived in Bukirimo village in western Kenya, she has known only one system of farming, which her community has depended on for generations. Cultivating sugarcane as the only crop in large plots is a common practice in the region, which is part of the larger Nile Basin, and Sitati was happy with it. Apart from creating jobs for thousands of Kenyans throughout the agriculture value chain, it’s a foreign exchange earner for Kenya, and a popular domestic sweetener. All along, Sitati knew growing sugarcane was a monoculture system and was comfortable with it. Lately, however, she’s begun questioning that after witnessing its destructive effects on soils and the environment. Its impact on the region’s food supplies and biodiversity has been high, and over the years, she has seen the system accelerate deforestation and dependency on industrial agrochemicals to boost production. The food forest at Naomi Rita Sitati’s home in western Kenya. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay. “Our soils are dead. When you try planting a food crop in a field where there was previously sugarcane, it does not grow. You cannot even see things like earthworms and ants,” Sitati says. Emmanuel Atamba, chief executive at Agricultural Production Systems and Institutions Development (APSID), a farming consultancy based in Nairobi, says sugarcane is also reliant on irrigation, where farmers must extract huge volumes of water from rivers and other water bodies. In the region, this extraction by communities in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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