Access to food is a universal basic human right. The website of the United Nations office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights states that every person irrespective of their limitations, should have access to affordable food to ensure that food costs do not limit access to other basic needs such as housing, clothing and medicine. Separately, article 46 of the Constitution of Kenya guarantees people the right to consume commodities of acceptable quality.
Amartya Sen’s entitlement approach reminds us that people secure food through different routes: some grow it themselves, others buy it from local or international markets, or transfers, whether from governments, aid agencies, or even relatives. Protectionist policy in its simplest form requires charging high taxes on imports to protect local producers against competition. For households already struggling to stretch their budgets as shall be proven in this blog, it raises the question: is the government protecting producers at the expense of affordable access to food?
According to Kenya’s latest poverty report, 2022, as shown in Table 1 below, 31.2% of the Kenyan population lived in food poverty, a strong indicator of food access constraints nationally, with the rural areas having a higher share of food-poor population. An adult equivalent requires an average uptake equivalent to 2,250 kilocalories daily. However, the data indicates a high food poverty rate in Kenya and therefore raises a fundamental concern about the leading causes of deprivation of the universal basic human right for more than 16 million Kenyans in 2022. This situation could be more severe in 2024.
Table 1:Headcount Poverty Rates in Kenya in 2022.
Source: Kenya Poverty Report, 2022, KNBS (page 29)
In 2023, the government of Kenya, through the Cabinet Secretary for Health, made this commitment to eradicate malnutrition, by adopting mechanisms to enhance food accessibility. This commitment to use public policies to improve nutrition-welfare of Kenyan citizens and residents forms the basis of recognising the harm in society.
Kenya’s reality constrains food self-sufficiency because 80% of its land is water scarce. Besides arable land being highly scarce, land has been mis distributed in the last six decades. Additionally, Kenya may have limited comparative advantage in agricultural production, relative to leading global producers and exporters such as the United States, Brazil, China, and Netherlands, underscores the resource constraints that make the pursuit of full food self-sufficiency economically challenging. Notably, the reduced competitiveness (comparative advantage) is highly influenced by the real effective exchange rate which shall be argued in a different blog.
Table 2 shows the current applied tariffs on imports into Kenya, with agricultural products being charged substantially higher tariffs in comparison to other products. Food is a normal good; hence, consumption is dependent on the availability of income (income effect), which is constrained by wages and price levels. High tariffs on food imports result in to substitution(substitution effe towards local alternatives, expensive imports or starvation if the former two alternatives are untenable. This is especially true if the high tariffs are meant to protect local alternatives due to their higher prices, which would render them uncompetitive in an open market.
Table 2: Kenya’s Tariff Lines by Product Groups
Source: World Trade Organisation, 2025
As illustrated in Table 2, in 2024, Kenya had low to zero free market access to food products such as live animals and meat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, beverages and cereals. These imported products are highly taxed for being sold in the Kenyan markets, with all of them bound at 100% tariffs, meaning that the government can impose a customs duty (tariff) equivalent to 100% of the price of the imported items. High tariffs are then passed down to consumers depending on the availability of substitutes and elasticity of demand. In the extreme, the importers may be discouraged from importing due to unaffordability (income effect); hence, the consumers in the local market suffer from limited food options and limited competition. Limited competition erodes consumer surplus by encouraging costly local products on consumers with little to zero alternatives.
Figure 1 shows weighted tariffs applied on food products globally, within Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya between 2000 and 2022. Kenya imposes higher tariff rates on its importers than the global and Sub-Saharan Africa averages for food product imports. Tariffs apply to food product prices and also disincentivize local food producers from innovating, specializing, and division of labour for more efficient production as they are protected. Despite the rare reduction of tariffs on food in Kenya during supply shocks like the 2006 drought, Kenyan tariffs have dominated global and SSA averages for the last two decades.
Figure 1: Weighted Tariffs Applied on Food Products in SSA, Kenya and Globally
Source: World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS), World Bank.
As shown in Figure 1, Kenya’s tariffs on food average 30%, while global and SSA averages are roughly around 10-15% and have been decreasing. In 2013 and 2022, election years, tariffs on food products rose, an indicator of the peculiarity of tariffs due to the political economy space the country operates in.
Kenya’s agricultural production is geographically diversified, with different crops concentrated in regions such as the Rift Valley, Western, Eastern, and Central Kenya. However, the country’s electoral dynamics are heavily shaped by regional bloc voting aligned with ethnic identities. This political economy context creates strong incentives for politicians to adopt protectionist measures as a means of appealing to their constituencies often including costly bailouts of uncompetitive production lines. Consequently, policymakers and the executive are inclined to leverage their constitutional mandates and political influence to shield local producers who, through strong unions and appeals to the electorate, have developed significant lobbying power.
Kenya has amongst the most expensive food products in the world. For instance, in 2012, according to a report by the World Bank, Kenyans prices for sugar was double international prices. This is because sugar imports are among the highest taxed items in the East Africa region, hence hurting sugar consumers with high sugar prices. High food prices as a result of high tariffs and high cost base is bad in itself. Additionally, Kenya policy makers have continually leaned towards protectionism including recently with banning sugar imports , rice imports hurdles and other products despite Kenya being among countries with the lowest Purchasing Power Parity incomes globally coupled by high poverty. These realities raise ethical questions and questions the unreliable economic reasoning that the country’s policy makers continue to defend.
In conclusion, high food prices and high tariffs on food imports, which are highly correlated, translates to malnutrition, stunted growth and starvation. Government administrations are obligated to ensure provision of public goods, correct market failure, and create social policy for the vulnerable and correct shocks. However, protectionist-leaning governments like Kenya’s chooses winners and losers, protecting some producers at the expense of consumers and other producers.
Firstly, the Kenyan government should not intervene in consumer choices by allowing people to buy food products locally or abroad and allow for open markets, with public sector role being to regulate against dumping which is not a huge occurrence, given open markets are best placed to protect and enhance human welfare. Secondly, Kenya’s local producers remain relatively uncompetitive globally due to continued protectionism, which makes them enjoy high markups locally at the expense of Kenyan citizens 40% of whom lived below the poverty line in 2022. This limits innovation by producers and encourages production that should have moved to different production lines to persist because open competition is not allowed.
High food tariffs applied to a country with inadequate domestic production and among the poorest populations globally are equivalent to starving Kenyans. The national tariff policies and East African Community’s (EAC) Common External Tariff (CET) on food should be abolished to allow people to get adequate and choice food. As they stand today, they not only reflect immoral choices that cause suffering and undernutrition in Kenya, but also long discredited import substitution policies. Food tariffs are bad economics and bad moral posture. They should be gone.
Kenya has benefited from its relations with the world. Multilateral, plurilateral or bilateral relationships with other countries has increased Kenyan firms and individuals market access, peace cooperations, import sources and aid. Kenya has trade relations with the United State of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran. One of the most consequential relationships between the […]
The National Infrastructure Fund Act (No. 4 of 2026) took effect on 25 March 2026 with a headline financing target: to raise about Ksh 5 trillion over ten years for highways, railways, ports, energy, information and communications technology, water and irrigation. The plan works like this. Privatization proceeds become the Fund’s starting capital. That capital […]
Introduction The matatu metaphor can be used to analytically frame Kenya’s budget as a system that is subject to binding constraints, evolving expectations, and continuous adjustment to shocks. Like the matatu sector, fiscal policy reflects a balancing act between efficiency and quick action seeking to respond to public service delivery while constrained by competing sector […]
Introduction Imagine paying the same fare to travel at 6 a.m. as you would at 6 p.m., even though the matatu is half-empty in the morning and packed in the evening. At 6 a.m., there may be more seats available than passengers willing to pay for them. By 6 p.m., the situation is reversed. Hundreds […]
Absurd hypotheticals are useful precisely because they stress-test a system until its constraints become visible. This note asks what would break first if SpaceX, now a public company following its record-breaking Nasdaq debut in June 2026, with a post-IPO market value of approximately US$ 2.5 trillion, sought a secondary cross-listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. […]
| Post date: Wed, Aug 27, 2025 |
| Category: Food |
| By: Moses Muchiri Mwangi, |
Access to food is a universal basic human right. The website of the United Nations office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights states that every person irrespective of their limitations, should have access to affordable food to ensure that food costs do not limit access to other basic needs such as housing, clothing and medicine. Separately, article 46 of the Constitution of Kenya guarantees people the right to consume commodities of acceptable quality.
Amartya Sen’s entitlement approach reminds us that people secure food through different routes: some grow it themselves, others buy it from local or international markets, or transfers, whether from governments, aid agencies, or even relatives. Protectionist policy in its simplest form requires charging high taxes on imports to protect local producers against competition. For households already struggling to stretch their budgets as shall be proven in this blog, it raises the question: is the government protecting producers at the expense of affordable access to food?
According to Kenya’s latest poverty report, 2022, as shown in Table 1 below, 31.2% of the Kenyan population lived in food poverty, a strong indicator of food access constraints nationally, with the rural areas having a higher share of food-poor population. An adult equivalent requires an average uptake equivalent to 2,250 kilocalories daily. However, the data indicates a high food poverty rate in Kenya and therefore raises a fundamental concern about the leading causes of deprivation of the universal basic human right for more than 16 million Kenyans in 2022. This situation could be more severe in 2024.
Table 1:Headcount Poverty Rates in Kenya in 2022.
Source: Kenya Poverty Report, 2022, KNBS (page 29)
In 2023, the government of Kenya, through the Cabinet Secretary for Health, made this commitment to eradicate malnutrition, by adopting mechanisms to enhance food accessibility. This commitment to use public policies to improve nutrition-welfare of Kenyan citizens and residents forms the basis of recognising the harm in society.
Kenya’s reality constrains food self-sufficiency because 80% of its land is water scarce. Besides arable land being highly scarce, land has been mis distributed in the last six decades. Additionally, Kenya may have limited comparative advantage in agricultural production, relative to leading global producers and exporters such as the United States, Brazil, China, and Netherlands, underscores the resource constraints that make the pursuit of full food self-sufficiency economically challenging. Notably, the reduced competitiveness (comparative advantage) is highly influenced by the real effective exchange rate which shall be argued in a different blog.
Table 2 shows the current applied tariffs on imports into Kenya, with agricultural products being charged substantially higher tariffs in comparison to other products. Food is a normal good; hence, consumption is dependent on the availability of income (income effect), which is constrained by wages and price levels. High tariffs on food imports result in to substitution(substitution effe towards local alternatives, expensive imports or starvation if the former two alternatives are untenable. This is especially true if the high tariffs are meant to protect local alternatives due to their higher prices, which would render them uncompetitive in an open market.
Table 2: Kenya’s Tariff Lines by Product Groups
Source: World Trade Organisation, 2025
As illustrated in Table 2, in 2024, Kenya had low to zero free market access to food products such as live animals and meat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, beverages and cereals. These imported products are highly taxed for being sold in the Kenyan markets, with all of them bound at 100% tariffs, meaning that the government can impose a customs duty (tariff) equivalent to 100% of the price of the imported items. High tariffs are then passed down to consumers depending on the availability of substitutes and elasticity of demand. In the extreme, the importers may be discouraged from importing due to unaffordability (income effect); hence, the consumers in the local market suffer from limited food options and limited competition. Limited competition erodes consumer surplus by encouraging costly local products on consumers with little to zero alternatives.
Figure 1 shows weighted tariffs applied on food products globally, within Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya between 2000 and 2022. Kenya imposes higher tariff rates on its importers than the global and Sub-Saharan Africa averages for food product imports. Tariffs apply to food product prices and also disincentivize local food producers from innovating, specializing, and division of labour for more efficient production as they are protected. Despite the rare reduction of tariffs on food in Kenya during supply shocks like the 2006 drought, Kenyan tariffs have dominated global and SSA averages for the last two decades.
Figure 1: Weighted Tariffs Applied on Food Products in SSA, Kenya and Globally
Source: World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS), World Bank.
As shown in Figure 1, Kenya’s tariffs on food average 30%, while global and SSA averages are roughly around 10-15% and have been decreasing. In 2013 and 2022, election years, tariffs on food products rose, an indicator of the peculiarity of tariffs due to the political economy space the country operates in.
Kenya’s agricultural production is geographically diversified, with different crops concentrated in regions such as the Rift Valley, Western, Eastern, and Central Kenya. However, the country’s electoral dynamics are heavily shaped by regional bloc voting aligned with ethnic identities. This political economy context creates strong incentives for politicians to adopt protectionist measures as a means of appealing to their constituencies often including costly bailouts of uncompetitive production lines. Consequently, policymakers and the executive are inclined to leverage their constitutional mandates and political influence to shield local producers who, through strong unions and appeals to the electorate, have developed significant lobbying power.
Kenya has amongst the most expensive food products in the world. For instance, in 2012, according to a report by the World Bank, Kenyans prices for sugar was double international prices. This is because sugar imports are among the highest taxed items in the East Africa region, hence hurting sugar consumers with high sugar prices. High food prices as a result of high tariffs and high cost base is bad in itself. Additionally, Kenya policy makers have continually leaned towards protectionism including recently with banning sugar imports , rice imports hurdles and other products despite Kenya being among countries with the lowest Purchasing Power Parity incomes globally coupled by high poverty. These realities raise ethical questions and questions the unreliable economic reasoning that the country’s policy makers continue to defend.
In conclusion, high food prices and high tariffs on food imports, which are highly correlated, translates to malnutrition, stunted growth and starvation. Government administrations are obligated to ensure provision of public goods, correct market failure, and create social policy for the vulnerable and correct shocks. However, protectionist-leaning governments like Kenya’s chooses winners and losers, protecting some producers at the expense of consumers and other producers.
Firstly, the Kenyan government should not intervene in consumer choices by allowing people to buy food products locally or abroad and allow for open markets, with public sector role being to regulate against dumping which is not a huge occurrence, given open markets are best placed to protect and enhance human welfare. Secondly, Kenya’s local producers remain relatively uncompetitive globally due to continued protectionism, which makes them enjoy high markups locally at the expense of Kenyan citizens 40% of whom lived below the poverty line in 2022. This limits innovation by producers and encourages production that should have moved to different production lines to persist because open competition is not allowed.
High food tariffs applied to a country with inadequate domestic production and among the poorest populations globally are equivalent to starving Kenyans. The national tariff policies and East African Community’s (EAC) Common External Tariff (CET) on food should be abolished to allow people to get adequate and choice food. As they stand today, they not only reflect immoral choices that cause suffering and undernutrition in Kenya, but also long discredited import substitution policies. Food tariffs are bad economics and bad moral posture. They should be gone.
Kenya has benefited from its relations with the world. Multilateral, plurilateral or bilateral relationships with other countries has increased Kenyan firms and individuals market access, peace cooperations, import sources and aid. Kenya has trade relations with the United State of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran. One of the most consequential relationships between the […]
The National Infrastructure Fund Act (No. 4 of 2026) took effect on 25 March 2026 with a headline financing target: to raise about Ksh 5 trillion over ten years for highways, railways, ports, energy, information and communications technology, water and irrigation. The plan works like this. Privatization proceeds become the Fund’s starting capital. That capital […]
Introduction The matatu metaphor can be used to analytically frame Kenya’s budget as a system that is subject to binding constraints, evolving expectations, and continuous adjustment to shocks. Like the matatu sector, fiscal policy reflects a balancing act between efficiency and quick action seeking to respond to public service delivery while constrained by competing sector […]
Introduction Imagine paying the same fare to travel at 6 a.m. as you would at 6 p.m., even though the matatu is half-empty in the morning and packed in the evening. At 6 a.m., there may be more seats available than passengers willing to pay for them. By 6 p.m., the situation is reversed. Hundreds […]
Absurd hypotheticals are useful precisely because they stress-test a system until its constraints become visible. This note asks what would break first if SpaceX, now a public company following its record-breaking Nasdaq debut in June 2026, with a post-IPO market value of approximately US$ 2.5 trillion, sought a secondary cross-listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. […]