Agriculture sector riddled with problems, 56 years after start of self-rule

What you need to know:

  • Despite lofty speeches and policy statements, successive administrations have paid agriculture lip service.

  • In the present financial year, for instance, agriculture was allocated a paltry 2.9 per cent of the voted expenditure, falling far below the Malabo commitment of 10 per cent.

  • The government’s responses to food security are also either ill thought out or designed with rent-seeking in mind.

Kenya’s agriculture has been a mixed bag of boom and decline since independence.

The cotton, cashew nut, sisal, sugar and pyrethrum industries that thrived in the early years of independence have all but collapsed, with the half-hearted efforts to resuscitate them coming a cropper. Meanwhile, maize, the country’s main food crop, has struggled, riddled with natural and man-made woes.

EXTENSION SERVICES

Wrong use of fertiliser, prolonged drought due to climate change, and failure by the government to promote irrigation, as well as poor marketing policies that benefit brokers at the expense of farmers, have made Kenya a net importer of maize.

Pests like the fall army worm, and diseases like maize lethal necrosis (MLND), have also been more virulent in recent years, wiping out the crop, especially in the South Rift Valley region, the country’s second food basket.

Non-existent extension services have compound these woes. Today a Kenyan maize farmer, on average, produces only a third and a fifth of their Chinese and US counterparts, respectively.

Early this year, the World Bank rebuked the government for lacking the commitment to reform the sector.

ARID AND SEMI-ARID

"With 83 per cent of Kenya’s land area being arid and semi-arid, one would expect the use of irrigation in farming would be a top priority. Nonetheless, only 2 per cent of arable land is under irrigation, compared to an average of 6 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa and 37 per cent in Asia," the Bank noted. The Bank also favours small-scale irrigation projects over large ones that are a magnet for corruption.

Prof Odhiambo Ndege, an economic historian, traces Kenya’s agricultural woes to the faulty foundation laid by the colonial government and the path charted by its founding fathers.

He says the Swynnerton Plan of 1954, which was intended to boost African productivity, allocated land to people who had no desire to till it professionally and produce food. In most cases, they hoarded it for speculation.

LIP SERVICE

At independence, these elite acquired even more land, robbing genuine farmers of the means of production and denying the country food security.

Despite lofty speeches and policy statements, successive administrations have paid agriculture lip service.

In the present financial year, for instance, agriculture was allocated a paltry 2.9 per cent of the voted expenditure, falling far below the Malabo commitment of 10 per cent. The government’s responses to food security are also either ill thought out or designed with rent-seeking in mind.

Amid these bleak news, however, another Kenya marches on, often in spite of the government, highlighting the country’s potential to hold its own in the world.

A highly developed horticulture sector saw exports increase by 9.6 per cent to Sh124.3 billion, accounting for 22.9 per cent of the total domestic exports in 2018.

YOUNG GRADUATES

Kenya is also home to successful conservation agriculture farms that produce wheat and pasture under low rainfall in such areas as Timau.

The government now plans to ape and scale up some of these successful models under its Agricultural Sector Transformation and Growth Strategy, 2019-2029. A key proposal is the establishment of 50 new large-scale farms of 2,500 acres or more, to unlock up to 500,000 acres of new farm production.

Agriculture Principal Secretary Hamadi Boga says the government is also banking on young agriculture graduates to professionally run farms under a model adopted from Ethiopia, which doubled its coffee production through a similar measure.

This sounds progressive, but only walking the talk will take the country to its rightful place.