A Kenyan gov­ern­ment report gives some num­bers to the short­falls in food that could be expe­ri­enced in the coun­try. The report says that the food sta­ple maize could be com­pletely gone by September.

From this IRIN story that we found at Relief Web, we receive some quotes from the report.

“At the begin­ning of August 2009 the coun­try had about 500,000MT of maize against a monthly require­ment of 300,000MT, sug­gest­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of seri­ous short­falls by the end of Sep­tem­ber,” the Kenya Food Secu­rity Meet­ing (KFSM) said on 20 August in its 2009 Long Rains Assess­ment (LRA) Report.

Accord­ing to the KFSM, 9.9 mil­lion Kenyans are food inse­cure: of whom 3.8 mil­lion are drought-affected, 1.5 mil­lion vul­ner­a­ble school-children, 2.5 mil­lion urban food-insecure, 2.5 mil­lion affected by or liv­ing with HIV/AIDS and some 100,000 inter­nally dis­placed (IDPs).

The LRA report was pre­pared by the Kenya Food Secu­rity Steer­ing Group (KFSSG), which com­prises rep­re­sen­ta­tives from var­i­ous gov­ern­ment min­istries, some UN agen­cies, the Famine and Early Warn­ing Sys­tems Net­work (FEWS Net), Oxfam GB and World Vision.

The KFSSG con­ducted the long rains food secu­rity assess­ment in late May and July 2009, cov­er­ing 30 dis­tricts, most in the drought-prone arid and semi-arid (ASAL) areas of north­ern and northeastern Kenya. It was a follow-up to its short rains food secu­rity assess­ment in February.

“Con­tin­ued export bans in neigh­bour­ing coun­tries of Tan­za­nia and Uganda are likely to reduce cross-border maize inflows by 46 per­cent. The reduced lev­els of pro­duc­tion and imports are likely to com­pound the tight­en­ing maize sup­ply sit­u­a­tion,” the report stated.

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