Kenyan farmers uprooted by violence return with guards

Farmers from the Rift Valley, who were forced from their land because of postelection violence in the region, prayed before exiting the army truck that brought them home last week. (Stephanie McCrummen/Washington Post)

NEAR CHERANGANI, Kenya - In the fertile Rift Valley region last week, convoys of army trucks began returning thousands of farmers to their fields.

Deep in the rolling green hills, the new arrivals - some willing, some not - pitched white tents alongside abandoned rows of dried-up corn. Protected by police armed with AK-47s, they began clearing weeds and hoeing the dirt.

"The government has told us to come back to cultivate our land," Theresa Matei said as the sun set on her first day back at the farm - land that local militiamen had chased her from in January. "They gave us two blankets, just only two. And they've given us seeds, but no fertilizer. We will see what happens next."

The advent of farming under armed guard in Kenya is the result of this country's recent postelection political crisis clashing with a global food crisis that has already driven up the price of corn - the staple of the Kenyan diet - about 30 percent in recent months as the cost of fertilizer has nearly tripled.

After Kenya's disputed presidential election in December, local militiamen drove hundreds of thousands of farmers from their homes across this western region, leaving thousands of acres abandoned as the farmers languished in camps for the displaced.

At the same time, most active farmers are planting only about half their fields because of the high price of fertilizer, so that altogether, at least one-third of Kenya's farmland is idle.

Independent Kenyan agricultural specialists predict that current stores of corn will be gone in a matter of weeks and that the next big harvest, beginning in October, will produce only half the usual yield. This will leave Kenya dependent on imported food, the cost of which is skyrocketing as global demand far exceeds supply.

Faced with a cascading disaster, officials are approaching the task of resettling the displaced farmers with a new - some say reckless - urgency. Realizing that many of those displaced may be terrified of returning to the farms where they were attacked, the government has begun providing armed escorts, along with seeds and hoes. In a deal with the government, a Kenyan bank will soon provide loans to small-scale farmers.

Some specialists say, however, that the initiative will barely begin to address a deeper problem that the political crisis has only exacerbated: a chronic corn deficit that has worsened each year as Kenya's population has risen, leaving the country increasingly vulnerable to the vagaries of the global marketplace.

"Kenya has been caught with its pants down," said James Nyoro, executive director of the Tegemeo Institute, an agricultural research organization in Nairobi, which is predicting a "major food crisis" by August.

Meanwhile, the army trucks loaded with farmers are headed to areas where the difficult task of reconciliation has barely gotten underway, and many people worry that the returnees will be chased away again in coming months.

"Peace does not come because police are there - reconciliation is a process and we need more time," said Joseph Mwangi, a pastor and chairman of a camp in Cherangani. "But if they're not on their farms now, we'll not have food in 2009."

It was about 3 p.m., and people in the last group that day to head home were rolling up the white tents where they have lived for the past five months. They packed up the new hoes and the government-provided seeds - intended to provide a crop in three months rather than the usual nine - and heaved it all onto an idling army truck.

Though there were people who were happy to be going home, Agnes Kerubo was not one of them. Like others, she had not been back to her farm since she was attacked in daylight by neighbors with bows and arrows and machine guns, people she once trusted and who still live just a five-minute walk from her place.

She had a week's worth of yellow peas and corn flour rations and a couple of burlap sacks of belongings. "I don't have a house, because they burned it down," Kerubo said, adding that there was one reason the politicians who had abandoned them for months were now paying attention.

"They are pressuring us to go and cultivate because our area is the central source of food."