Galana-Kulalu project may not feed Kenyans any time soon

It had been touted as the silver bullet that will turn Kenya from a food importer to an exporting powerhouse. The 1.7 million acre Galana-Kulalu Food Security Project, with a name that suggested that hunger will be kept away from Kenya’s boundaries, was born.

Then the State machinery started pumping in money. In financial years running from 2013/2014 to the upcoming 2017/2018, Sh14.4 billion has been sunk into this project. This means that of the Sh58.4 billion budgeted for supporting irrigation projects, a quarter went to this project.

Under National Irrigation Board, the State said irrigating 1.2 million acres of the expansive ranch that lies between Rivers Galana and Tana will end food shortage. The Jubilee government under its manifesto, then made a bold promise that within five years, running up to end of 2017, it will have put one million acres of land under modern irrigation.

But in the recently launched Jubilee administration’s delivery portal that features its development record, Water and Irrigation CS Eugene Wamalwa, admits that government has only added 105,000 acres under irrigation since 2013.

Despite CS Wamalwa saying on the clip that “We have made yields that were never known in the country... 39 bags of 90kg each per acre,” data from engineers in Galana put it at 31 bags.

Grand project

The biting hunger across the country may have come too soon for the state’s ambitious project that is still in its pilot phase.

Lying in the Tana River and Kilifi Counties, the project has been in model phase for long with just four acres having been put under maize as at the last harvest in February.

The hunger that started punctuating the country’s face since late last year forced the government into knee-jerk reactions.
It allocated Sh16 billion to save starving families followed by giving private millers a tax free import window to help ease price of staple food maize floor.

It also released one million bags from National Cereals and Produce Board to save the situation. When these moves yielded little, government has turned to Sh90 per two kilogram of floor subsidy to cushion the public from the most sought for commodity.

From Galana-Kulalu project, its third harvest of 103,000 bags saw Taita Taveta, Tana River and Kilifi counties get 10,000 bags as relief food while 33,000 bags were taken by Strategic Grain Reserve office.

For the first three years that the project has been on model, a cumulative harvest of 124,132 bags have been harvested.
The first phase was to do to 10,000 before expanding further but so far, just about 4,000 acres have been done.

According to the chief engineer of planning and design as well as the manager for the grand project Thuita Mwangi, most of the expenditure has been on infrastructure.

“At planting we are at 40 per cent but on infrastructure, we are at 80 per cent. We expect to complete infrastructure for the model farm and plant the entire 10,000 acres and harvest by December,” Eng Mwangi told Financial Standard.

He says that infrastructure has been laid on 8,000 acres so far. The implementing team of the project insist that it is on course and that having narrowed down to four best maize varieties, the yield is at 31 bags per acre. During the initial stages, over 13 varieties of maize were tried out but the project implementers have so far narrowed down to four varieties with promising returns.

Gradual step

Extending the project beyond the 10,000 acres, the project manager says, will have to be a gradual step since huge capital outlay is expected.

Kenya imports about three million bags of maize. Assuming the current productivity level, doing just 100,000 acres of the project can make Kenya a food surplus nation and trigger need for exporting.

However, even with the gradual expansion, the project can only reach 30,000 acres beyond which a dam will be required.

In October last year, chief site engineer Henry Ochiere told the press that doing the full capacity of the project will require one mega dam with a capacity of two trillion litres (two billion cubic metres). This, Eng Mwangi says, can only be completed in six years from the time construction will begin.

This makes the ambition of Kenya using the project to become food secure to be a long wait. “To construct that dam will take six years. Once we do it, we can call private investors to put up the entire area under irrigation,” he said.

During the three years that have seen the project court controversy, the engineers say that they had to construct intake points to abstract enough water to run the project. That required the first 20 months.

The project required water pans with each taking 30 days to be completed. In total, the pilot phase requires 24 pans but so far, just 10 have been done with orders for the remaining having been done. They are expected to be shipped in from Israel.

With the 6-year dam and general slow pace of implanting the project standing in the way of Kenya’s quest for food security, it means that Jubilee’s administration cannot extend the project beyond 30,000 acres by 2022 should they clinch a second term.