Potential For Periodic Markets As Nodes Of Food Trade And Territorial Development: A Case Of Machakos-Kitui Road, Machakos County, Kenya

Abstract

Sustainable agriculture and healthy food standards, applicable to a changing climate; with the capacity to preserve existing ecosystems; are among the more significant policy contributions that can neither be overlooked nor over-emphasised. Notably so with the bourgeoning human population. Agriculture evolves with people, trends, and needs. However, with periodic farmers markets, due to the primal notion of food as a basic need, this can be considered a driving force to growth, development, and even the death of agriculture. We are what we eat after all. Understanding the dynamics that revolve around contextual push-pull factors within the sector and how these markets motivate development, change, and subsequent evolution of urban morphology, are key to finding the elusive links between rural and urban planning, food security, sustainable communities, contextual economies, poverty mitigation, and even urbanisation. The culmination of these factors is an amalgamation of characteristics that define sustainable integration of food systems or lack thereof with the rapidly growing human population. The study seeks comprehension of the impacts of food supply chains in periodic farmers markets, while also assessing the extent to which these factors influence territorial development. The study identifies major markets in the periodic circuit. It also finds various resultant alternate periodic markets which play a role in the territorial development of the rural hinterlands that can be considered the regional catchment of the primary periodic market circuit. To arrive at this deduction, the study incorporates data collected from various traders, farmers, farmer-traders, market brokers, business communities, consumers, several transport sector interest-holders and stakeholders, security forces, local administration, as well as households within the regional catchment. The study alludes to both direct and indirect correlations of factors that play a role in the food trade. The impacts of climate change on food security, food deserts, and food distribution are combined with the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic to act as cause and effect for the circulation of currency and the resultant socio-economic capacity. While these variables are perceived to create differing economic environments, the adoption of various altruistic mitigation measures within the contextual setting seems to find means of sanitizing the already harsh economic environment. Food distribution dictates rural autonomy, more so in Kenya where agriculture dominates the country’s GDP. By ensuring food security, rural development and spatial planning can thereafter be considered. Asset mapping of the regionalised context facilitates the establishment of plausible navigability of these phenomena, thereby necessitating this study in the approach endeavoured.