What Kenya can do about the end of cheap ugali

A customer buys a packet of maize flour at Kasturi supermarket in Nyeri town on July 4, 2013. We need to start thinking beyond ugali. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Wheat consumption has increased by 25 per cent from 28kg to 35kg per person per year.
  • Maize used to be much cheaper than wheat and rice but the gap has been closing.
  • From both a food as well as commercial value perspective, even a yield of five bags of rice beats five bags of maize any day.

The cheapest 2kg packet of unga at my local supermarket is still selling at Sh130.

The cheapest wheat flour brand, on the other hand, is selling at Sh110.

From the conversations that I have heard, what has shocked Kenyans most about the maize meal price is that ugali has become more expensive than chapati.

Five years ago, it was the reverse. Maize flour was retailing at Sh110 on average and wheat flour at Sh130.

EATING LESS
We do love our ugali. According to the national food balance sheets compiled by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, we are each eating an average of 60kg of maize a year.

This contributes a quarter of our food consumption in terms of calorific intake, 56 per cent of the cereal calories and 47 per cent of calories from starchy food.

But consumption patterns are changing. A decade ago, maize contributed 30 per cent of the total calorific intake, 70 per cent of cereal calories and 56 per cent of calories from starchy food.

We are eating 10 kilos (15 per cent) less per person of maize than we did a decade ago. What are we eating instead?

PRICE DIFFERENCE
We are eating more wheat and tubers. Wheat consumption has increased by 25 per cent from 28kg to 35kg per person per year.

We are also eating a lot more tubers, Irish potatoes in particular, but also sweet potatoes and cassava, increasing tuber calories from 13 to 20 per cent.

Consumption of Irish potatoes has grown from 15 to 40kg per person per year.

That said, ugali remains the best value for money of all these starchy foods.

The food balance sheets suggest we consume 1,000 calories of starchy foods daily.

At the normal price of maize Sh110 per 2kg packet, the daily requirement comes to Sh17 as compared to Sh25 for wheat at the price of Sh130 for a 2kg packet.

It’s a significant difference. The difference between a maize only and wheat only starch diet for a family of four would be Sh840 per month, which adds up to Sh10,000 a year.

ALTERNATIVES TO UGALI
Even at Sh140 for a 2kg packet, maize still gets you the daily requirement at Sh22.

Rice is not very good value for money.

At Sh120 per kg — which only buys you Grade II rice — you need Sh30 for the daily requirement.

Potatoes are even worse value for money. Although potato prices fluctuate widely, the average seems to be about Sh35 per kg.

At this price, the 1,000 calorie daily requirement sets you back a good Sh50.

I often hear people, even policymakers, dismissing the kelele (noise) about unga as one of those peculiar habits we are supposed to have, that Kenyans should stop their preoccupation with ugali and eat all these other alternatives.

I even saw the President on TV the other day dismissing the unga price spike offhand, and insisting, forked tongue as usual, that the price of unga three years ago was Sh140. The poor, Mr President, cannot afford cake.

MAIZE HARVEST
While the current spike in the price of unga is attributable to drought, it is actually part of an underlying upward trend.

Maize used to be much cheaper than wheat and rice but the gap has been closing.

Ugali is destined to become more expensive than chapati. Why?

The primary reason is low productivity. The average maize yield rose steadily during the 70s and 80s from six bags per acre to a high of nine bags per acre in the late 80s.

It has stagnated at 8.5 bags ever since. In the meantime, the population has been growing by leaps and bounds — by 10 million people over the last decade.

We are still managing to grow more maize to keep up with the population, but with yields stagnant, we are doing so by ploughing more land.

To feed these 10 million more mouths, we have increased the acreage under maize by a million acres.

GALANA-KULALU PROJECT
Since our agriculture is predominantly rain-fed, expanding acreage also means that we are moving maize growing into less suitable land, which partly explains why the stagnation of yields, that is, rising productivity in the traditional growing areas, is offset by the low yields in the marginal acreage.

Land is a finite resource. We may be reaching the limit, as production appears to be fluctuating around a 40 million bag average.

The Galana-Kulalu mega irrigation scheme is the Jubilee administration’s idea of a solution to this problem.

According to the information provided, the project aims to grow maize on 200,000 acres.

If the target of 40 bags per acre were to be achieved, this acreage would raise the potential production by eight million bags.

At current consumption, that would be enough to keep up with population growth for another decade.

But large scale irrigation projects have a habit of over-promising and under-delivering, and Galana-Kulalu is looking like one of those.

Four years down the road, the project is still at the experimental stage, with only 2,500 acres of the planned 10,000-acre “model farm” developed.

IMPORTING MAIZE

If it is at all successful, we are looking at best at another five years before we can talk of meaningful commercial production.

In the meantime, we need an additional 800,000 to a million bags of maize a year. What to do?

We can import. But the problem is that the international market for white maize is rather thin so the prices are extremely volatile.

Our best bet is the region. Uganda, Tanzania and South Sudan have a lot more land that can grow maize more cost-effectively.

If we were to become a dependable market, people can invest in growing maize for our market.

The trouble is, we have equated our food security with maize self-sufficiency.

In fact, the Galana-Kulalu project is a reflection of this mentality.

We can lease 200,000 acres or more of excellent maize-growing land in Uganda and South Sudan for a fraction of the cost.

Another option is to make the alternatives cheaper. The top candidates here are wheat and rice.

The case of wheat is the easier one. Liberalise. We already import 85 per cent of the wheat we eat.

A LIABILITY

Wheat is classified as a “sensitive product”, which enjoys protection under the EAC Common External Tariff.

Currently, the tariff is 35 per cent. Since we are the only country that grows it, we can presume that the protection is driven by our wheat farmer lobby.

Our farm gate price of wheat works out to $350 (Sh36,148) per tonne, almost three times the global market prices of $130 (Sh13,426) per tonne.

The world price works out to Sh13 per kilo of wheat grain.

Even after shipping and milling, wheat flour would cost no more than Sh80 for a 2kg packet.

At this price, our daily requirement works out to Sh15.30 — about 10 per cent cheaper than maize.

Wheat is a temperate crop. The only reason we grow it is because Lord Delamere came with it.

It also happens to be grown on some of our best agricultural land. We will never produce it competitively.

It’s about time we did away with it. In fact, because virtually all the wheat products we eat — chapati, mandazi, bread — require a lot of oil to cook, increased consumption of wheat would also increase consumption of vegetable oils.

The wheat farmers would very likely make more money from oil crops than they do from wheat.

POVERTY TRAP
Rice, as already noted, compares unfavourably with maize and wheat in terms of nutritional value for money.

But it can, in a roundabout way, be a big part of our food security mix.

As observed earlier, our maize yield is only 8.5 bags per acre against a potential yield of 30 to 40 bags.

The principal reason our maize yields are so low is because of our many smallholders who grow it for subsistence.

That said, at 18 to 25 bags, even our commercial farmers in the North Rift are still well below potential.

But the big problem is our poor smallholders growing an acre or two of maize and getting only five bags an acre.

In economics, we call this the subsistence poverty trap. Because of being poor, they are more vulnerable if food markets fail, as they often do, which in turn makes them more risk-averse, which in turn makes them stick with low-yield but more reliable crops.

ADVANTAGES OF RICE
You may be wondering what rice has to do with it.

One of the most exciting developments in agricultural research of recent years is the successful breeding of rain-fed rice varieties specifically for resource-poor African farmers. Known as Nericas (New Rice for Africa), these rice varieties do not require flooded fields, yielding between 10 and 20 bags per acre depending on inputs.

From both a food as well as commercial value perspective, even a yield of five bags of rice beats five bags of maize any day.

For whatever reason, we have been much slower in adopting the rice than other countries.

For instance, the government only registered the varieties in 2009, seven years after Uganda.

But rice has many other advantages for risk-averse and resource-poor farmers.

The shorter growing season makes it less prone to drought than maize, and it also means in places like western Kenya, smallholder farmers can have two crop seasons.

LIFE BEYOND UGALI

In fact, small fields can even be irrigated by hand to save a crop from drought.

It also has less post-harvest management problems compared to maize, including low risk of aflatoxin poisoning.

In effect, the Nericas offer our resource-poor farmers a lower risk alternative to maize.

But food security is also a matter of taste. They don’t have to eat much of it.

In fact, the Ugandan farmers don’t either. They sell it and buy matoke.

The long and short of it is that we need to start thinking beyond ugali.

Ndii, an economist, is currently leading the Nasa Technical Committee [email protected]