“Poor households are the hardest hit by this,” said Timothy Ngagi, an agricultural economist at Tegemio Research Institute. “One of the disadvantages of globalization is that if something happens on one side of the world, it will have an immediate effect on the other side of the world. I expect the price to keep going up and pass on to the consumer.”

That’s what’s really going on at Lydia Wanjoy’s bakery and Joseph Wachera, who run the bakery together, and they recently raised the price of a loaf of bread. “Customers are turning away now,” Lydia says. “For the average Kenyan, an extra 10 cents is too much. They can’t afford it.” So while bread is an important staple food for Kenyans.

In addition, it was already hard times economically in Kenya: the Corona pandemic led to tax increases that had already hit consumers hard in the wallet. Yusef shakes his head. “Last month we made twenty to fifty loaves of bread,” he says. “But since the war it has halved.”

Agricultural economist Ngaji has a hard head about it. “This will exacerbate the problem of poverty,” he says. Ngaji expects rising food prices to slow the economic recovery from the Corona crisis. At the same time, this crisis presents opportunities to produce more in Kenya: “It is important that we start growing our own food.”

In the video of our African correspondent, Saskia Hotwin, he notes how the war in Ukraine is affecting the lives of Kenyans: