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An aggressive disease is wreaking havoc on Kenyan maize farms and could lead to an acute shortage of the country's staple food, agricultural experts and farmers have warned.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture, maize lethal necrosis was first detected in January by farmers in the Nyanza and Rift Valley Provinces. The disease is airborne and causes infected plants to stunt, wilt and die at the flowering stage.

The ministry estimates that about 300,000 farmers, who produced 3.5 million 90-kilogramme bags of maize last year, have been affected by the disease this year.

"There is a need for urgent action to prevent the disease from spreading to other national food baskets like the North Rift," said David Nyameino, CEO of the Cereal Growers Association. "If this happens, the country runs a risk of having a shortage of maize for the next year. Since maize is a staple food for many Kenyans, this will be tantamount to a national food shortage."

Nyameino said government and private research firms should pool their resources and collaborate in their research to protect farmers from further losses and ensure the country's food security remains intact.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and the Kenya National Statistics Bureau, maize consumption in Kenya has risen steadily over the past ten years. Kenyans ate 23 million bags of maize and produced 26 million bags of maize in 2002, creating a surplus. But in 2011, Kenyans consumed 43 million bags of maize and produced 30 million bags, demonstrating that production has not kept pace with demand. The 13 million-bag deficit has been met through imports.

In March, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga warned that Kenya will exhaust its domestic maize supply by July, saying the country must allow imports to meet its food security needs. Experts and farmers have urged the government to facilitate further research on crop and soil needs, as well as the use of high-quality farm imports such as fertilisers and disease-free seeds.

"The current situation needs to be treated with more urgency by the state than we are currently witnessing, as agricultural officials are visiting farms without offering tangible solutions," said Poltas Nyanchama, a maize farmer from Kineni Settlement Scheme in Nyanza.

Nyanchama said the maize shortage has become a national security issue. "The current situation is already causing panic in the market, with the price of a two-kilogramme packet of maize flour going for almost 120 shillings ($1.42), up from 100 shillings in January," she told Sabahi.

After investing more than 200,000 shillings ($2,370) on her 10-acre maize farm, Nyanchama said the money will go to waste since the stalks cannot even be fed to animals due to the severity of the disease.

"We have been advised to either bury or burn stalks, since there have been reports of cows dying after eating them," she said. "We do not know which farm was first infected, but every farmer's maize crop in this area has been devastated -- the leaves turn yellow and the whole plant rots away within weeks."

To mitigate the problem before a permanent solution is established, the Ministry of Agriculture has advised farmers to use certified seeds, avoid planting maize in fields prone to flooding, and plant at times without draught stress, which exposes crops to the disease.

Initial studies by the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate indicate that maize lethal necrosis originated sometime last year at a farm in Taveta in the coastal region.

"Although we have identified the disease, we know very little about it. For now, we are researching further to find out its characteristics and traits so that we that can develop a remedy," said Johnson Irungu, an official with the Crop Management Directorate in the Ministry of Agriculture. "We have formed a combined team of researchers from Egerton University and the International Maize and Improvement Centre who are expected to come up with a solution soon."

Irungu told Sabahi that samples of the affected crops were flown to the United Kingdom in May for further tests. He said 30% to 40% of the maize planted in the areas of South Rift Valley and Nyanza provinces have been affected by the deadly disease.