Abstract: We present a chiral (K) over barN interaction model that has been developed and optimized in order to account for the experimental data of inelastic (K) over barN reaction channels that open at higher energies. In particular, we study the effect of the higher partial waves, which originate directly from the chiral Lagrangian, as they could supersede the role of high-spin resonances employed in earlier phenomenological models to describe meson-baryon cross sections in the 2 GeV region. We present a detailed derivation of the partial wave amplitudes that emerge from the chiral SU(3) meson-baryon Lagrangian up to the d-waves and next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. We implement a nonperturbative unitarization in coupled channels and optimize the model parameters to a large pool of experimental data in the relevant energy range where these new contributions are expected to be important. The obtained results are encouraging. They indicate the ability of the chiral higher partial waves to extend the description of the scattering data to higher energies and to account for structures in the reaction cross-sections that cannot be accommodated by theoretical models limited to the s-waves.