Scenario modelling of the seasonality of food availability in Kenya

Abstract

The Agriculture sector is the backbone of the Kenya's economy; it contributes 25% of the Kenya's GDP. However, over the years there has been a gap between the food consumption and the food requirement needed by the people. This has emergedfrom the effects of a rapid increase in the population growth and climate changes in the country. The small-scale farmers who contribute 75% of the total agricultural market are from time to time faced with various risks like climate changes and have less resources to curb these difficulties. Previous research has been done on how to improve the technology efficiency among the farmers and assist them in making better decisions and working in conducive environment. Various models have been introduced to access the various risks and shed light on the prediction of the agricultural productivity in the country. In this paper, we used the GLOBE model where we collected Kenya's baseline diets and population projections data from World Bank, FAO and United Nations. We analysed the dependency of these variables to the expected agricultural productivity in the future. The data was used to get the estimates of the average capita food consumption over various scenarios in the year 2030. In conclusion, we estimated three scenarios of the future food consumption and food requirement using the Economic (GLOBE) Sub-Model. This allowed us to isolate the effects of population growth and climate changes to the food system in Kenya and ultimately estimate food security gap.