Government must not let sorghum go the quail way

Few things explain the relative poverty or prosperity in different parts of Kenya as clearly as the kind of crops grown in a particular area does.

It all started with the wabeberu regime declaring cash crop growing the exclusive right of white settlers while prohibiting the natives from doing so.

The ‘Cash Crop Wall’ supposedly fell in 1963, but farming in the country has largely retained the uneven colonial-era face on the watch of successive post-independence governments.

The folks living on the so-called former white highlands in Rift Valley and Central Kenya plant coffee, tea, pyrethrum, wheat and maize, have little difficulty accessing credit and markets – including the foreign ones – and more often than not get some income.

Their counterparts elsewhere are still largely into subsistence farming, sweating it out on mean soils and producing barely enough for the family table.

Of course, it’s not all government’s fault and not much can be done to make tea or coffee growing a commercially viable enterprise in a dry agro-ecological zone like Ukambani anyway.

The struggling farming communities tend to be too slow to take up innovations. My agricultural extension teacher at Egerton told us of how efforts to introduce a nutritious bean variety once flopped in Siaya after folks there took issue with its strange colour.

NOT GIVEN CHANCE

The sheer number of similar agricultural innovations that weren’t given a chance makes the recent adoption of sorghum as a commercial crop in different parts of the country a rare success story.

Key players in this project like the government and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa have hailed it as a game-changer.

But how did they pull it off? The trick was to go beyond the usual agricultural extension activities to building a value chain. The demand created by the East African Breweries Limited (EABL) for its low-cost Senator beer brand, which is made from sorghum, was perhaps the most important link.

The Cereal Growers Association says that the opening of the EABL market saw the production of sorghum shoot up to 150,000 metric tonnes last year from “almost nothing” in five years ago, the price go up from Sh7 to Sh26 a kilo and the acreage increase significantly.

There were reports of an emerging sorghum boom. That was until the geniuses at the Treasury had a brainwave and slapped an excessive 50pc excise duty on beer made from sorghum last year.

EABL responded by cancelling contracts with farmers. A study by Egerton University’s Tegemeo Institute says EABL’s exit rom the sorghum value chain has cost the various actors about Sh3.4bn in incomes.

There are fears if the newly built sorghum market keeps shrinking at the rate it has in the past one year it will most likely collapse in two or three years, making it the second crash after quail. The consequences of a collapse – poverty, malnutrition, joblessness and inequality – are too grave to contemplate.

Otieno Otieno is chief sub-editor, Business Daily. [email protected]. @otienootieno