NAIROBI: There are growing concerns among farmers in the Rift Valley over the President's failure to attend the Eldoret agricultural show that ended on Saturday last week.
The four-day event was expected to give farmers in the region a platform on which to engage the president over their concerns.
Failure by either the President or his deputy to open the agricultural fair as has been the tradition for many years has raised eyebrows and opened speculation that the president deliberately avoided tackling the myriad of issues raised by farmers before the Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture and that his government has paid little attention to farmers who have been going through a difficult period.
Farmers in the country's main bread basket region have gone through lean times, with middlemen taking advantage of the Government's failure to buy maize from farmers to exploit them.
Last year, farmers protesting low prices for their maize and the failure by the National Cereals and Produce Board to buy maize from them barricaded roads in Eldoret town.
While the cost of a 25kg bag of seed is Sh4,500, up from Sh3,750 in 2013, middlemen have been purchasing a bag of maize from desperate farmers for as low as Sh1,500. The NCPB ran out of funds to buy maize only a few days after the Government announced it would pay Sh2,300 per bag.
The President and his team cannot run away from addressing issues that beset farmers, and especially now that the country faces a shortage of grains occasioned by the vagaries of nature.
Due to poor storage facilities, most of the farmers lost their yield after NCPB failed to buy it.
The Government must go out of its way to encourage production, and one way of doing this is by subsidising the price of fertiliser and seed.
It would boost the farmers morale if the President honoured the pledge he made in 2013 to lower the cost of fertiliser.
Engaging them in an honest discussion over the future of maize farmers and what the Government intends to do to shelter them from exploitation will go a long way in assuring them of the Government's commitment to addressing their problems.
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