Echoes of the past in new plans for agriculture

What you need to know:

  • Although not original or innovative by any stretch of the imagination, the 10-year Agricultural Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy 2019-2029 contains useful proposals that could inject a fresh impetus to the much neglected but critical agriculture sector.

  • It places welcome emphasis on protecting millions of small-scale farmers and pastoralists by cushioning them from the often deadly impact of unpredictable weather and ever-increasing production costs.

The country unveiled proposals this past week that if well implemented could significantly improve the contribution of the agriculture sector to the overall economy and the food security situation. But this, like many others, will remain only a road-map if there is no concerted effort to drive to the destination.

MOBILISATION

Although not original or innovative by any stretch of the imagination, the 10-year Agricultural Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy 2019-2029 contains useful proposals that could inject a fresh impetus to the much neglected but critical agriculture sector. It places welcome emphasis on protecting millions of small-scale farmers and pastoralists by cushioning them from the often deadly impact of unpredictable weather and ever-increasing production costs.

Emphasis is placed on provision of inputs and equipment at the production stages, intervention at the value addition phase and ensuring efficiencies in market access. However, the target of reaching 2.4 million farmers under this plan over a 10-year period is modest given the reality of population growth and food security needs.

If we cannot feed the population of about 48 million now with 65 per cent of the food we eat coming from anything between four to nine million small-scale farmers, improving the production capacity of a mere 2.4 million may not necessarily meet the needs of a population growing by about one million people every year.

The proposal speaks of boosting the food resilience of 1.3 million “farming, pastoralist and fishing households in arid and semi-arid lands through specific interventions and more active coordination with development partners and mobilisation of private sector resources”.

INNOVATIVE

Realising that focusing on small-scale holdings alone will not provide adequate answers to the agricultural revival dilemma, the proposal talks up the role of large-scale private farms (those over 2,500 acres), 50 of which will be deliberately targeted to benefit from government infrastructure such as power and roads, ostensibly to reduce the cost of production and remove route-to-market obstacles. But 50 works out to just about one farm per county! Does not sound terribly ambitious.

Consider also the fact that small-scale farming is currently dominated by an ageing population (the majority above 60 years) that inevitably must make way to younger ones. It is not clear whether this is the challenge being addressed by the proposal to launch programmes focused on technical and management skills in the field “for 200 national and county transformation leaders, 1,000 farmer-facing SMEs and 3,000 extension agents”.

As I said earlier, though welcome, this 10-year plan is not innovative. Press reports this week quoted the scepticism of the Parliamentary Budget Office that rightly argues that there already are enough clever ideas out there that could have guaranteed Kenya a thriving agricultural sector by now.

Some of this thinking is contained in documents like Vision 2030; the Third Medium Term Plan 2018-2022; the Agriculture Development Strategy 2010-2020; Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Strategy 2017-2026 and Ending Drought Emergencies: Common Programme Framework (2015).

EXECUTIVE

I submit that the huge amount of energy and resources put into developing these plans are frustrated by failure of leadership that consistently has lacked the determination to focus on execution of the really important things. President Moi’s government allowed all the progressive, public driven initiatives of the first two decades of the independent Kenya to be wiped out by the World Bank and IMF sponsored structural adjustment initiatives of the 90s.

Now the country is being taken back there through a mongrel dose of public and private initiatives without a really serious attempt to address two issues of immense concern — runaway corruption and how to achieve real coordination between development partners and government. Until and unless President Uhuru Kenyatta, or any other leader, makes corruption a really painful alternative to earning an honest living, there will be no incentive to channelling resources to activities and plans meant to benefit the larger good.

The other issue is the need for better coordination between different agents to maximise on the available resources. Msingi East Africa is a development agency specifically focusing on boosting industries that have huge potential to create wealth and earn us foreign exchange. It has recently invested in a fish farm in Homa Bay that will probably be the biggest in Africa. There is every likelihood that the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries has only been nominally involved in this project, if at all.

Mr Mshindi, the former editor-in-chief at NMG, is now consulting; [email protected]