After Harvest Failure: The Mental Health Cost Kenyan Smallholders Pay for Climate Agenda Blind Spots

After three decades of being repeatedly ground down by anxiety over climate upheaval, Josephine Kihu, a coffee farmer near Nyeri, can no longer describe her situation with the phrase "living at the mercy of the heavens." According to Africanews, the unusually sparse rainfall this year forced her to hire people to water her coffee trees, and even with those additional costs, she may still end up with nothing.

"Can you imagine how much money has been invested here? I have invested a lot, and in the end I may harvest nothing, I may die. As a farmer, you can really go mad," Kihu told Africanews. She has run her coffee farm in Nyeri for a full thirty years and is now forced to switch to more drought-resistant varieties.

Charles Ndungu, a goat farmer in Kieni, described a similar trajectory of collapse. According to Africanews, he has been raising goats for more than twenty years, but the early rains that arrived in March this year were insufficient to build up the pasture needed to sustain his herd through the long dry season, and in June an outbreak struck; in the three months from July, he lost 40 goats. "We rely on goats to pay our children's school fees — sell one or two and we can send a child to school. Without goats and money, we have a lot of problems," he told Africanews.

These cases point to a dimension long neglected by the global climate agenda: farmers' mental health. Kashindo Gakago, a clinical psychologist at Nyeri's Outspan Hospital, told Africanews that he estimates roughly one-third of his patients are farmers suffering mental health problems triggered by repeated agricultural losses.

"The cumulative losses, combined with that long-term pressure of always calculating 'what should I do now,' especially when you feel you have lost control — the weather, for instance, is simply beyond your control," Gakago said.

He further warned that climate change may bring about an erosion of farmers' sense of identity: when they are forced to abandon familiar farming practices, switch livelihoods, or even leave home in search of more viable conditions, some will turn to alcohol or other substances for solace.

Kenya is facing unstable weather patterns brought on by the combined impact of a super El Niño and climate change. According to Africanews, climate-related agricultural losses are translating into quantifiable mental health pressures, but this dimension has so far not been systematically incorporated into support systems aimed at farmers.

Gakago has therefore called on policymakers to embed mental health within farmer support programmes, promote climate-smart agriculture, and improve access to irrigation. When the commitments of the climate governance agenda still mainly point to yields and livelihoods, and rarely touch the inner world of an anxious human being, the voices from Nyeri serve as a reminder: when a farmer says aloud, "I may die," and such commitments ultimately cannot bear the weight of that sentence, they remain suspended in mid-air.