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While you can easily get an acre of good farmland for between Sh200,000 and Sh400,000 in many parts of the US, you need between Sh1 million and Sh10 million to get the same size in the high-potential areas of Kenya.
CHEAPER IMPORTS
And while the farmer in the US will get subsidies and other incentives, her counterpart in Kenya will instead, often single-handedly, some of the harshest farming conditions anywhere, as if it's not bad enough, be saddled with all manner of taxes.
And to break even, it is to prohibit prices that are not match for cheaper imports from Uganda, Tanzania and even China.
These, and other absurdities, are the reasons Kenya's agriculture will keep stagnating and the country continues to be fed by its neighbors, warn experts.
"Despite the facts that Kenya and other African economies rely on agriculture, their farmland is not defined and protected," notes Mr Henry Kinyua, the East Africa head of Digital Green, an organization that empowers smallholder farmers by harnessing technology and partnerships.
Mr Kinyua, a Nyeri minister for agriculture, says that it has become more important in rural areas.
"If there was proper planning, for instance, such cities as Tatu, Migaa, Thika Greens and others, which were sitting on rich agricultural land, Prof. Peter Ndege of Moi University's Department of History Kenya's runaway prices and food Security troubles to the Swynnerton Plan of 1954, which has been allocated to a few individuals.
"While the Swynnerton Plan was intended to intensify production among Africans, it was also one of the few propensities that would lead to colonial power in the struggle for independence," explains Prof Ndege, who wrote Agrarian Kleptocracy and Land Question in Kenya.
CARTEL
At independence this elite inherited even more land and became politicians and powerful civil servants. But while they had the land and the support to farm, they were inefficient producers because they were not full-time farmers.
In most cases, the real estate owners are here for speculation, and not for production, as intended by Roger Swynnerton.
Instead, they are collaborating with the state to create what is known as "cartels", which leads to a reduction in the price of fertilizer, and to a lower price.
Meanwhile, the other Africans who were isolated by the plane kept subdividing their land to today's uneconomical levels. This, and the speculation, has been pushed to today's dizzying levels.
It is also the Swynnerton Plan, Prof. Ndege argues, that made Kenya a beverage economy, producing tea and coffee for America and Europe at the expense of food for its citizens.
"The problem with Kenya's agriculture is simply our collective greed," concluded Josphat Sirma, a dairy farmer in Rongai.
Labor, inputs and feeds are so expensive, he says. "Semen here, for instance, costs Sh2,000 when it is imported at Sh400. he poses.
So, what is he doing in Kenya?
RENT-SEEKING
A look at the commodity futures this week reveals many Kenyan products are more expensive than the international market.
A brewer's waste costs Sh5 in Kenya while in Uganda it is Sh1.20. In the US, soybean meal goes for Sh36 a kilo while in Kenya it costs Sh75.
Professor Bitange Ndemo of the University of Nairobi says it can be a little too late to change the country's land tenure system, the government can tax idle land and further subdivision beyond five acres.
"In the US, for instance, the government gives you a contract and asks you to produce so much." They give you back the land, he explains.
The solution to Kenyan farmers' woes seems to be off, with allocations to agriculture still kept low (2.9 per cent of the budget expenditure this year) and responses to food insecurity ill-thought-out or as a result with the Galana-Kulalu irrigation project and the Sh60 billion scandal dams.
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