Why farmers’ own agency can turn around fortunes

County leaders around Mount Kenya deserve commendation and encouragement for coming up with a strategy that would see their farmers sell their coffee jointly.

They are right to be cautious about sweet-talking middle-men, some of whom nearly led Nyeri County down the garden path. But the leaders need to look beyond selling, and also focus on production.

The willful mismanagement of the coffee sub-sector in the past discouraged farmers in these counties that many of them either neglected the crop or uprooted it altogether.

The first step, therefore, should be to come up with well-proven strategies to up production. This is because as a group of farmers in Nyeri are finding out, there is plenty of money to be made even when the price paid for their coffee hovers round Sh55 per kilogram.

The secret to the farmers’ success lies in increasing their farms’ productivity from 2.5 kgs per tree to 13kgs. A comparison with Columbian and Brazilian coffee producers, whose productivity is about 20 kgs per tree, should encourage the farmers in Nyeri to re-double their efforts. This is as they continue to serve as examples to other local growers. It is safe to assume that the productivity of other coffee farmers around Mount Kenya has stagnated at between two and three kilogrammes per tree and they have quite some way to go to catch-up to their Nyeri counter-parts.

It should also be a matter of concern to Nyeri County leaders that the higher productivity has only been achieved by a small number of women farmers working with a private sector company. Ideally, the leaders would be examples to the other farmers in efforts aimed at finding out just what they are doing right, although this in itself is no secret.

The road to increased productivity for all farm produce begins with soil analysis to determine its nutrients and offer a guide on which kind of crop to grow in a given area.

Costly affair

This means the practice of importing a particular fertiliser for a specific crop grown across the country is costing the nation an arm and a leg. Not only does the country lose the money used in the imports, but also unsuitable fertiliser destroys the soil.

The fact that all these counties have departments of agriculture staffed with qualified personnel means it will not be difficult for them to work hard to get the desired results. All these departments need is visionary leadership. While they are at it, the county leaders should also take a keen interest in another area that is a cause for grave concern; horticulture.

It is not right that exporters should continue enjoying the margins they are getting on the already-bent backs of the farmer, who does all the work and takes all the risks.

A little investigation to reveal the average prices for Kenyan produce in, for example, British and European markets, is staggering when compared to what the farm-gate prices paid locally. The only conclusion is that the middle-men at both ends of the market are making a killing.

There are estimates that even the cheapest horticultural crops would fetch five times the price paid locally were the farmers to export their produce themselves.

It is noteworthy that whereas the exporting companies are united and have an association that lobbies for their interests, the horticultural farmers are scattered each in their own corner. This dispersal is what makes the exploitation of these farmers easy.

Fix unilaterally

This exploitation extends to exporters’ demanding that farmers under contract use the in-puts they give them whose prices they fix unilaterally.

The counties’ leadership needs to come together to craft a new marketing strategy to get their farmers from these uncompetitive practices. If this means setting up an exporting agency modeled along the lines of the Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) which has, and continues to serve its members, well so be it.

It is time the national government also ended its hands-off policy towards the sector that has the potential to pull millions of Kenyans out of poverty in less than a decade, and at relatively little cost to the exchequer.