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Oatmeal and Water

Nairobi Living, in a Season of Expensive Food

By Horand Knaup

Until recently Ali Omar worked as a chauffeur. But he lost his job just as food prices began to rise this year -- and now his family is lucky to eat two meals a day. How normal Kenyans slip into the starving class.

Getting to Ali Omar Katembo's house isn't easy. He lives in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, but he can only be reached on foot -- by abandoning the paved street and dipping into a world of hastily patched-together shacks and small shops along increasingly narrow dirt alleys.

Getting to his house means crossing the Nairobi-Kampala rail line, wading through mud, and stepping over piles of garbage that have already been flattened by other feet, in a neighborhood that stinks of fecundity and decay and turns into an open sewer whenever it rains. It rains frequently in Nairobi.

Ali Omar, 50, lives in the heart of Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums, with an estimated population of 1.5 million people. When Ali Omar built his hut there 32 years ago, only about 8,000 people lived in Kibera.

There isn't much space in his hut, all 20 square meters (215 square feet) of it. He has raised four children in the hut, and two of his sons, now 18 and 21, still live there with him. It is dark in the hut, where guests are invited to sit on a sofa that is so old and worn that its original color is no longer discernible. Buckets hang from the ceiling to catch the water that leaks through the corrugated metal roof during heavy rains.

But Ali Omar is one of Kibera's more fortunate residents. Until recently, he worked as a chauffeur. He has to fetch his drinking water in canisters, but his hut has cement walls and electricity. He's also collected a few modest possessions over the years -- a bicycle, a refrigerator, a computer and a TV set. He even pulls out a digital camera.

But times have become tough for Ali Omar. Ever since he lost his job, exploding prices have become a growing problem.

A two-kilo bag of wheat flour that cost 40 Kenyan shillings (about €0.40, or 64¢) only a year ago now goes for three times as much. The price of sugar has jumped from 40 to 85 shillings, and four tomatoes cost 10 shillings instead of 2.

Wages, though, haven't moved.

Two Meals a Day, and Falling

The family normally eats twice a day. "Breakfast is not necessary," says Ali Omar, but a meal of boiled corn porridge or wheat for lunch and dinner was standard in his household until recently.

Food has become increasingly scarce. Because more and more agricultural land worldwide is being devoted to "energy crops" for biofuel, and because speculators control the big picture, making a financial killing on the worsening relationship between supply and demand, a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast is all that Ali Omar and his family have to eat until evening. On days when there is lunch, the family must make do with nothing but water in the evening.

"Sometimes we eat nothing at all for two days," says Ali Omar.

When he's flush, Samuel, his unemployed brother, pays him a visit in the hopes of scrounging a cup of tea or a bowl of corn porridge. But these days Ali Omar himself needs help: He's forced to put his groceries on a tab at the supermarket around the corner.

Ali Omar no longer understands the globalized world, which has penetrated into his hut. When he went to buy rice the other day, he faced a choice between domestic and Pakistani rice, which is meant to be cheap. "Now it costs 65 shillings, too," he says indignantly. "It was only 30 shillings a year ago."

There are also domestic reasons behind skyrocketing prices in Kenya. During months of political unrest, many crops were not harvested, and grain and vegetables ended up rotting in the fields. Even when crops were harvested, some truck drivers, fearing attack, refused to transport the goods.

Hunger is ubiquitous, even where aid efforts are underway. On the western outskirts of Nairobi, 290 refugees live in tents in Camp Waithaka, which accommodates those displaced by recent violence. "Providing enough food has become difficult," says camp director Susan N. Kantai. The two daily additional portions of oats for children have been eliminated, while adult rations have been slashed to a quarter of previous levels.

The situation is expected to worsen even further. Many Kenyan farmers are no longer farming their fields, or else producing just enough for themselves. The price of diesel fuel has risen by more than half within the last year, while that of seed corn has doubled. Fertilizer costs two and a half times as much as it did in April 2007. To make matters worse, a fungus has infected a significant portion of rice fields. "We'll have a real problem by August," says Iris Krebber of the aid organization Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (German Agro Action).

In the past, supply bottlenecks were limited by region, and they affected the poorest of the poor. Now -- for the first time -- the crisis has hit many countries at the same time, heightening competition for food and raising world market prices. For the first time, the Ali Omars of the world are sliding into the starving class.

To help make ends meet, his 41-year-old wife Marian has started working in a small shop around the corner, where she sells tea and sweet potatoes. On good days, she earns 100 shillings, or about €1 ($1.60).

Her husband longs for a return of the 1980s, when there were government price controls in Kenya. The new government, he says, must "control prices once again and import free medicine for everyone." That, according to Ali Omar, would bring his life back to normal.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan