AFRICANEWS

Kenya

Storm in the Coffee pot

Economy

Coffee farmers in the country have for the last couple of years been frustrated due to mismanagement of co-operative societies by a few people who run them like their personal property at the expense of the co-operators.

Peter Kinyanjui is a small-scale coffee farmer Nyeri district in Central Kenya. On this particularly hot Saturday afternoon, he leans on a coffee tree that he has just been pruning. He looks up at the sky as if marvelling at how this clear African Blue sky can ever give way to dark threatening clouds. But Mr Kinyanjui is not marvelling at anything. In fact a closer look at him reveals not a philosophical curiosity but great disappointment and frustration. He has been pruning this coffee farm for the last 19 years.

Kinyanjui has seen days when he could afford to pay school fees and medical bills for his family and still be in position to maintain a relatively good living standard. This unfortunately has not been the case for the last decade or so. Indeed his coffee harvests though constant in terms of quantity and quality has been fetching less and less money every year, pushing him down to the very borders of abject poverty.

This situation is not limited to him alone but is in fact a representation of what more than two million farmers in central Kenya are facing. Declining prices in the local market is pushing many farmers in central Kenya to poverty, so fast that they like of Kinyanjui can only look up at the sky and hope for manna like the Biblical Israelites.

Coffee, being the main income generator of central Kenya region, its collapse as is the case now, has had devastating effects on hundreds of families. Many children can no longer afford schooling. Mary Wanjiku, who still lives with her parents is a single mother of two. As she gathers firewood among dried coffee branches, she murmurs without amusement about the uselessness of their coffee farm which takes a whole acre of their three-acre land.

She believes that, the land taken up by the coffee trees could be put to better use by planting more economically rewarding crops. Her father, unfortunately cannot take any of it. Having seen better days especially the first two decades after independence, when coffee was fetching high prices, can only attribute the present crisis to some form of economic sabotage by some forces in the government.

Indeed this is the view held by the majority of the people who have been around long enough to taste the good days in the coffee sub-sector. Veronica Wanjiru aged 70 narrates how she was overjoyed with the advent of independence in 1963, because for the first time she could plant her dream crop – coffee. According to her, this is the crop that had made the colonial masters rich. She was positive that by having a farm of her own she could be as rich as most of the Europeans who owned coffee farms.

In the event she did not become as rich as any of them but she reminisces that this was because her husband was not a plantation owner. In any case she recounts how she managed to pay school fees for her seven children and still afford a descent living. Now she complains, she is unable to even give a single decent meal to her three orphans.

Wanjiru belongs to the lucky few, who have something positive to say about coffee. John Kaniaru aged 27, is not persuaded at all to tend his coffee farm that he recently inherited from his late father. Despite being jobless and in dire need of cash, he fails to find any justification in terms of remuneration for the enormous labour that goes into producing coffee vis-à-vis the peanut returns.

Unlike Wanjiru, Kaniaru is not ignorant of the role the government has played either covertly, overtly or by default, in the making of this sad state of affairs. He like most other farmers, is aware of the high prices Kenyan coffee fetches due to its high quality. To be sure former German Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Gerdts during his tenure was on many occasions wont to emphasis to the Kenyan authorities of the exceptional nature of Kenyan coffee and its ability to fetch enough for the farmers. There is no justification for the continuos fall in production over the years from 130,000 tonnes produced in 1989, to the levels recorded last year of 43,000 tonnes.

Kaniaru and most farmers of his age are aware of the intricate battles being fought in the coffee sub-sector to protect personal interests. These battles are so intense that the farmers would rather make a blanket accusation against the government for its conspicuous absence in solving these problems since they don't know whom else to blame.

They however know that the battle is between the Kenya Coffee Planters Union (KPCU). , The coffee Board, and the individual private millers for example the Thika Coffee Mills.

Analysts in the industry are today agreed that the present problems stem from underproduction. Two of the main players, Kenya Planters Cooperative Union (KPCU) a government Parastatal and Thika Coffee Mills (TCM) a privately owned company are currently suffering from excess capacity. KPCU has a capacity to mill 150000 tons while TCM has capacity for 60,000 tons. Indeed it is this capacity under-utilisation that is partly responsible for the disruptive competition that has seen these players fighting for control of cooperative societies at grassroots level to ensure that they get the coffee from these factories for their milling and marketing purposes.

The giant cooperative societies especially are at a higher risk. One such example is the Mukurweini Cooperative Society which brings together 18 coffee factories and a member ship of 20,000. Last year its production stood at 11 million Kilograms, quite a tempting bait for the various millers. The millers have unfortunately, used unscrupulous methods of competition such as bribes and blackmail.

Situations have turned particularly nasty when one section of leaders owes its loyalty to one miller and another section to a rival miller. Indeed violent fights have ensured and have left five farmers dead and scores injured. In reaction to these fights some farmers have recently taken to uprooting their crop which they blame for the senseless fights that have pitted brother against brother.

Another serious anomaly in the industry is the fact that the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK) which is supposed to police the industry cannot fulfill its task efficiently because some of its directors double up as directors of KCPU a bitter rival of the privately owned milling companies. One such director is Mr Abraham Mwangi who was reported as being a coffee dealer, roaster and a member of the marketing board of CBK. Though he has since been sacked on charges of corruption, the running of the parastatal vis-à-vis the private millers remains in total chaos.

In the light of the above, it would be a legitimate question to ask, what the role of the government has been in the ongoing crisis. While the Provincial administration has sent the police to quell the fights among the farmers, nothing else has been forthcoming. To be sure, Some opposition members of Parliament from the troubled areas have accused the government of having a plot to destabilise the economic resources of the communities of the region so as to easily manipulate them politically. They argue that the government could do more especially in curbing the exploitation of coffee farmers by the dealers. Farmers get Sh 6 per Kilo, while the same fetches Sh180 in the international market

Yet when all is said and done, the two million coffee farmers continue to suffer from hunger and want because the government protects avaricious individuals who have reduced the coffee farmers to paupers. What is even more surprising is that a government in the third world can deliberately or through lethargy throw down the drain the sector capable of earning millions through foreign exchange as was the case with coffee through the first two decades after independence.

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