The Pesticide Management Initiative East African Region: Kenya Pesticides management for sustainable agriculture in Kenya
Food producers in Kenya are progressively intensifying their production to meet the domestic and export market demands. Often, this is closely associated with an increased use of Agrochemicals. When not managed well, pesticides may lead to resistance of plant pests and diseases, adverse health effects to farmers and consumers as well as environmental degradation. At the same time, consumers and markets are becoming stricter in terms on food safety requirements and associated residues levels. Kenya’s product is now under more scrutiny in the European Union with the recent change from 5% to 10% inspection rate on the Kenyan beans. This change was effective in May 2020 although discussions began much earlier.
With this backdrop the Pesticide Management Initiative East African Region (PEAR) project was formed. The project is an initiative between Kenya and the Netherlands and took place from 2016 to March 2020. The project worked on sustainable pesticide management (Integrated Pest Management - IPM), food safety and reduction of pesticide use risks. PEAR aimed at availing alternative low risk chemical products and biological control products in a timely manner to the producers. The project achieved this through improving the structure and registration procedures for pesticides, including bio pesticides. In doing so, the project is set to regulate excessive pesticide use by farmers by stimulating adoption of IPM.
The cooperation resulted in attaining the following results
- Benchmarking Kenyan registration procedures and risk assessment against international practices.
- Making low risk and biological product available through a fast-track registration.
- A survey was conducted to assess the use of pesticides, the level of awareness and the use of personal protective equipment by farmers growing tomato and kale.
- Curriculum development for IPM training on judicious pesticide use.
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For more questions regarding the PEAR project you can contact: In the Netherlands; Louise Wipfler - louise.wipfler@wur.nl and Kenya, Emily Osena - osenaemily@gmail.com for any other questions, suggestions or to sign up for our quarterly newsletter please send an email to nai-lnv@minbuza.nl you can also follow us on twitter to stay up to date: Follow @NLAgriKenya.