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"id": 225861,
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"speaker_name": "Mrs. Mugo",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Education",
"speaker": {
"id": 85,
"legal_name": "Beth Wambui Mugo",
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"content": " Thank you Mr. Temporary Deputy April 18, 2007 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 769 Speaker, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to support this Bill. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I want to join my colleagues who have congratulated Prof. Ojiambo for this very timely Bill. This is a Bill that needs support from all of us. We should not only support it by passing it in this House, but also making sure that it is given wide publicity. Everybody who needs to know about it should do so, and make use of it. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I have in mind training for those responsible for putting food on the table. To make this Bill useful, every house wife should be trained. By and large, it is the mothers who put food on the table for their families. We could use many women organisations like the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation and others spread all over the country to make sure that mothers are trained in nutrition. I believe that we could fight many diseases, especially where children are concerned, just by understanding and passing knowledge to mothers. We have come to a point where many people think that for good nutrition we need very expensive foods. This is not the truth. Sometimes, the very expensive foods cause big problems to our health. Simple foods like the wild vegetables, most of us were brought up on, are no longer there. We have examples of our grandparents who hardly ever needed medication. However, they lived for many years. This is because of the natural foods they made use of. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have become a dumping ground. Business people bring in products that have expired. You just need to look at a shelf in a supermarket and see how many foods have expired and are on the shelves. Nobody is taking care of that. A housewife or any house-keeper will come and buy those foods because sometimes they are on \"sale.\" I hope that this Bill will find a connection with the consumers organizations and they will be empowered to even take these people to court or to an authority which will be created to take care of nutrition in this country. That is a very worrying area through which many Kenyans are throwing their money away and not getting value for it. If anything, sometimes they pick diseases from those expired foods. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, another area that is very worrying is the genetically modified foods. I think, as a nation, we should know our stand on that because it is slowly sipping into the country. We do not know whether it is safe or not. I do not think that there is a policy, as a country, about what to do with genetically modified foods. Yes, we are hungry and some arguments have been put forward that we would rather get that food or go hungry because it produces quickly and in abundance. But we do not want our people to get a lot of food and then end up dealing with diseases, some of them incurable, which are brought about by foods we do not understand. I hope that the council or the institute that, that law falls within, will be empowered to look more into those areas. They will be able to do more research and get more information even from the international organizations to see what the rest of the world is doing. For example, are the genetically modified foods being eaten in the United States of America and other countries or are they producing them for us? We should accept development and how we can grow more food but we should not do it blindly. Let me say that Kenya is not poor in terms of food. We used to think that we cannot feed ourselves. But we have seen that in the last four years since the NARC Government came to power, we have not been importing food. We have been able to feed ourselves. It is just maybe the issue of market creating. That is moving those foods fast enough to areas where there is hunger. Those are areas that this Bill will address very critically regarding how we could grow enough food for ourselves through irrigation and how to move it to the areas where it is needed, so that, no Kenyan goes hungry. Food sufficiency or food security should be tied to this Bill. When this Bill is finally passed, I believe that the line Ministries will do their duties. They are many of them like the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health. It is not a one Ministry business. They will all take part in making sure that we make use of this very good 770 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES April 18, 2007 Bill. We do not want to pass Bills and then some of them end up on shelves; they do not get to see the light of day. We want to see a case like The Sexual Offence Bill where the initiative on the implementation was launched. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we take nutrition for granted or sometimes we think that it is not a glamorous field, but it is a field that would keep this country healthy. Without a healthy nation, we cannot be a working nation. So, I join the others in congratulating Prof. Ojiambo for the Bill, but the bigger challenge is to this House, the Government and the nation as a whole. This is everybody's Bill and together we will make good use of it. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, there is also the advertising area which we need to check. We see some brands of alcohol or liquor being advertised. We must look at how advertising is hurting the nation. It is not just liquor only. There are many people who believe that everything they see on the screen or hear on the FM stations is good for them. I hope that this Bill will be empowered to rein in such people who do not think about the health of the nation but how much money they can make. With those few remarks, I welcome this Bill very much, first as a mother and a legislator. We will now have a legal framework in which to regulate the nutrition of our people. I beg to support."
}