NAIROBI, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Kenya on Wednesday called on foreign investors to invest in agriculture in the 80 percent arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) portion of the country to improve food security.
Paul Rono, principal secretary of the State Department of Agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, said the ASAL regions are capable of producing food since they are fertile but only lack water.
"We have created an environment to enable the private sector and foreign investors to invest in agriculture to help improve food security, create jobs, and increase income in the regions," Rono told journalists in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
He said Kenya is taking cognizance of the ASAL regions after realizing that the regions are fertile and have the potential to produce food for domestic consumption and export through irrigation.
Rono said the current government is keen on positioning the East African country for resilient agricultural enterprises to bring to life the bottom-up economic transformation agriculture agenda.
He noted that Kenya is focusing on creating sustainable food systems by not only producing food for domestic consumption, but also increasing exports, reducing imports, and ensuring food security, as well as transitioning smallholder farmers into profitable enterprises.
Rono revealed that Kenya is currently developing a national agriculture policy master plan for the year 2024-2034 that will focus on farmers' access to services, provision of mechanization, provision of improved seed systems, and packaging of fresh produce for export.
He noted that Kenya intends to relocate populations in arable regions to the cities to allow serious farming to be undertaken to address the national challenges that include a growing population, under-empowered women and youth, a fragile food ecosystem, and poverty.
In 2023, Kenya leased 500,000 acres of government land to help boost food production.
Rono also announced that Kenya will host the Financing Agriculture Sustainability Conference (FINAS 2024) in March, which will be attended by actors in the agricultural sector to chart tangible investment and funding action plans that are alive to the current realities in the country.
The conference, he added, will include designing financing solutions to ensure relevance to the wide range of beneficiaries and de-risking approaches for injecting capital, such as blended financing. ■
