Urban Maize Meal Consumption Patterns: Strategies for Improving Food Access for Vulnerable Urban Households in Kenya

Abstract

The case for structural adjustment and food market reform, while widely accepted by donors and international analysts, has not been fully convincing to many African policy makers. Even though numerous African governments have embarked on such reform programs, internal dissent can and often has overturned them and reimposed controls on food prices and trade.1 Throughout the reform processes, concerns have arisen regarding the social costs of food market reform, particularly the impact on low-income consumers. Subsidies on some staples have been so high that their elimination has entailed ubstantial price increases for consumers. A critical problem facing African governments has been how to keep food prices at tolerable levels for poor consumers at a time when production incentives must be increased and subsidies must be eliminated. The purpose of this paper is to determine how food consumption patterns might change in response to various relative price and convenience scenarios conceivable under market liberalization in Kenya, and to assess the implications of these findings for urban food security policy. In much of Eastern and Southern Africa, there has been a longstanding perception that urban consumers strongly prefer the relatively expensive refined maize flour produced by large-scale industrial mills over less refined hammer-milled flour and are not responsive to relative price changes between them (Stewart 1977; Bagachwa 1992; Jayne and Rubey 1993; Guyton and Temba 1993). This view can be contrasted with the alternative ypothesis that maize meal consumption patterns are largely a manifestation of government policy over the decades. While consumption of the more costly sifted flour is partially determined by attributes of the product itself, its perceived popularity may have been exaggerated by decades of controls on maize marketing, which have restricted consumers' access to the less expensive, unrefined maize meal (posho) through informal trading and milling networks, and by large subsidies on sifted meal.