Late funds threaten coffee yield

Anticipation by local coffee farmers of realising a bumper harvest this season may not materialise if credit to facilitate the harvesting of their crop is not availed in time.

The Nation established on Tuesday that the loans, provided to the growers by the Coffee Development Fund, have not been made available to several smallholder farmers as well as to the estate coffee growers in the country.

Consequently, several farmers are in a predicament since the main picking season began last week and they do not have money to employ labour to harvest the ripe cherries.

Equally worried

The Coffee Board of Kenya, which is the regulatory body in the coffee industry is equally worried.

“I am afraid that if farmers don’t get money to employ labour for picking their ripe cherries we are going to lose a lot of coffee this season,” the board’s technical manager Bernard Gichovi said in a telephone interview.

He noted that labour has become very expensive saying farmers must be facilitated with money to enable them employ farmhands in farms where cherries will ripen very fast owing to the on-going rains.

Coffee, as a delicate crop, requires harvesting on time.

Once the cherries ripen they are supposed to be harvested immediately failure to which the quality of the beans is affected and the crop cannot fetch good prices on the world market.

Most of the farmers had applied for Coffee Development Fund loans between May and July this year. After submitting their application forms, they expected to get the money before the beginning of the main picking season.

Had applied

Reports from the CBK shows that in the current 2008/2009 season, at least 60,000 metric tonnes of coffee are anticipated compared to 42,000 metric tonnes in the 2007/2008 coffee year.

But the managing trustee of the Coffee Development Fund, Mr George Ooko said they have tried as much as possible to provide farmers with loans, “which we cannot do overnight”.

One of the problems the Coffee Development Fund, which is a revolving fund is facing, Mr Ooko said, is failure by farmers to repay the loans granted to them last season.

The Government had given out Sh750 million for the fund, which he noted cannot be sufficient for the more than 700,000-plus smallholder coffee growers in the country.