For ethical shopping Europeans buying Kenyan vegetables creates a dilemma between food miles and supporting poor producers. But for Kenyan farmers it’s about survival. Growers put their case to Susie Emmet.
In the fruit and veg sections of UK supermarkets, ethically minded shoppers pause in aisles, caught in a dilemma. Despite the season, mange tout are on the shelves. But they’re Kenyan. A purchase would support developing world farmers, but incur food miles. Maybe it would be more ethical to buy something local and seasonal instead.

Thousands of miles away lies the patchwork of plots where produce destined for European consumers is grown. Virginia Wangira, a tiny lady in her sixties, hurries in the early morning light between the rows of climbing pea plants to where members of her family are tenderly pinching the succulent mange tout pods from the parent plants and gently placing them in numbered plastic buckets. “I have built a good business out of this crop. Now life is better,” she says.

Buyers want both quality and quantity so Virginia and another 200 farmers in the village of Kinangop in the Aberdare range of hills in Kenya formed a growers’ group under the steady leadership of Russell Ng’ang’a. Chairman Ng’ang’a, who combines farming with teaching (and is head of English literature at a nearby boarding school for girls), is increasingly concerned that shoppers may not buy their vegetables because of their concerns about pollution from air-freighted produce. “It’s so very unfortunate, all these worries about food miles”, he sighs, “For three years we’ve worked hard to meet all the high standards the European consumer wants: built grading sheds and stores for our agrochemicals and set up record-keeping for complete traceability. Emissions of carbon dioxide should be reduced by other means than stopping altogether our produce.”

Growing export quality produce is tough. When hot winds blow up from the rift valley below, the pods shrivel. A sudden dive in temperature in the cool season and the pods are burned by the cold. There is also the march of invading insects to contend with. And much larger feet. Under cover of night, families of wild elephants emerge from the high forest to forage in the patchwork of plots on the just-ripe vegetables. Their plundering and blundering leaves a trail of broken fences and pea vines for farmers to repair in the morning.

Such determination and constant attention to detail has meant the smallholder farms – more than 500,000 of them – have succeeded where large farms failed. Indeed economic analysis confirms that export horticulture in Kenya has become a powerful engine for rural economic growth.

In Kirinyaga, a farming community in another exporting area, the crop of choice is a different temperate vegetable: green beans. There is a mosaic of green smallholder plots between lush groves of bananas and maize. By nine each morning, Edwin Mgenge – the exporter’s representative in the village – is weaving his way along the right-angling paths between the plots of French beans from which he has ordered today’s harvest. “The great thing here is that young people can leave education with a future in the field,” he says, which is why he reacts to news about the food mile furore with dismay. “These villages produce hardly any pollution. They use hand tools in the fields and use very little electricity in the home. But, because of rich country pollution, Europeans think food miles are bad. Where is their heart?”

It is not just the money that is valued. Maina Kanene, green bean farmer, pauses from checking his crop for telltale signs of insect attack or disease to explain how the training has helped: “Growing for export has taught me so much about good agricultural practice which I now use for all my crops.”

Increasingly worried by the air miles backlash, Kenya’s exporting smallscale farmers have been reassured by recent reports that – even with air travel – the carbon footprint of their produce is lower than many crops grown in Europe. Of course consumers may also wonder why a country like Kenya, which often has hunger within its borders, is feeding Europeans rather than its own people. But Lydia Njuguna, an agronomist with the Kenya Horticultural Development Programme, describes how it is common for each farm – often less than an acre – to grow more than a dozen crops and the export plots are rotated with carrots, cabbages, maize and potatoes that are all for Kenyan consumption. “What do Europeans want? To see us all stay in poverty? To come to Europe looking for jobs? I don’t think so. The beans and snowpeas we export to Europe are high value so the farmers can at last earn more and be able to invest in better lives and further developments. It’s important that we get away from just subsistence agriculture.”

"More than two-thirds of all people surviving on less than $1 a day live and work in rural areas, either as small holder farmers or as agricultural workers."

By late morning bicycle bearers, weaving between the potholes of the rutted red roads, pedal the crates of justpicked beans to the group grading sheds to be sorted and await the exporter’s daily lorry shuttle to the packhouses. Today’s pickings will tonight be on a fl ight bound for Europe. Virginia, Russell, Maina – and all the other smallholder exporters of Kenya – are at one end of a very long food chain. They are deeply worried that environmental concerns could destroy the chain that sustains them. That’s not to say that Kenyan farmers aren’t worried about climate change. They are. But they also want shoppers to understand the price of not buying their tasty, nutritious air-freighted fresh vegetables.

“Our farming contributes very little to global warming. We use people to weed the fields. We don’t use tractors to produce the food that is exported. I wonder whether stopping the export of our produce to Europe would stop the planes fl ying? Would hurting our farmers really reduce the carbon emissions?”
Virginia Mwai, Quality Assurance and Food Safety, Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture