The Two Rivers mall glorifies consumption. Why not celebrate production like that?

Last week, Two Rivers mall opened in Nairobi, just past Runda. It is a huge edifice carved on a hillside, overlooking a river with shops on many levels.

With Two Rivers and The Hub in Karen joining other recently built malls, some are asking if there are too many malls, and if new malls are drawing foot traffic away from older ones.

Malls are expressions of consumer activity. But we need more producer activity from the private sector to power the economy, create jobs and lift Kenya to the middle-income country envisioned in Vision 2030. This activity is expected to come from two sectors: agriculture and manufacturing.

While African countries have made technological leaps, such as from having no phones to having mobile phones and bypassing copper land lines and faxes, that is unlikely in agriculture and manufacturing. 

There are some advances happening, however, but they don’t get reported much. One is in industrial parks.

At a TED Ideas Nairobi event on February 8, 2017 at Catholic University, Maggie Kigozi, an investment promotion expert from Uganda, spoke of the need for Africa to have industrial parks as hubs of production. 

Currently, investors face challenges acquiring land in scattered areas and have to put up their own expensive utilities.

A recent Knight Frank report highlighted that Nairobi lacks an adequate supply of prime industrial and logistics spaces and that most of the current ones are old and located in traffic-congested Industrial Area.

If you look at an old map of Nairobi, you can track how trains ran from Industrial Area to the railway station, but those rails have been built on, blocked off and discarded.

Knight Frank noted that sophisticated international occupiers require industrial properties with high-tech specifications equivalent to South Africa or Eastern Europe. Build industrial parks, and investors will set up factories to process and enable job-creating, value added exports.

HARD FARM LIFE

Other progress is in export-processing zones (EPZ). Did you know Sh65 billion in sales was degenerated by EPZs, which employed 50,000 workers?

Also, the Special Economic Zones Act enacted in December 2015 has made several companies keen on investing in Kenya. The apparel sector has since created over 20,000 jobs, eclipsing NSE-listed firms in recent job creation.

Finally, from an Instagram account called “Feed the Planet” we get a sense of some global food production trends.

Some countries featured include tiny Netherlands, which with land reclaimed from the sea has invested to become the second-largest exporter of food in the world after the USA, mainly in fruits and vegetables.

Other global stories include an egg farm in Brazil, which produces 2.7 million eggs a day from four million hens, and a Swedish farm with 700 Friesian cows that voluntarily chooses when a laser robot system can milk them.

China has three times the population of the United States but only a fraction of the arable land and would struggle to feed itself, so it’s now the world's largest importer of food.

Like Kenya, China has traditionally produced most of its food from peasant farms, but now has a young population that is not keen on the hard farm life that is increasingly moving to cities in search of jobs.

China has now had to nurture innovative mega-agricultural techniques to feed the country, such as a dairy farm in Anhui with 39,000 Friesian cows that processes and packs milk and yoghurt on site, a Taiwan chicken farm that hatches 20,000 genetically identical chickens per day, and an aqua farm in Jiangsu that sells 500 metric tons of frogs per year.

Kenya, like China, is also feeling some pressure to feed its population. At a workshop organised by Africa Knows, Siddarth Chatterjee of the UNDP cited President Kenyatta, who had said that population growth is an existential threat, as he compared Kenya and Sweden.

INVADING NATIONAL PARKS

In 1956 the population of each of the two countries was 7.6 million. But today Kenya’s is 45 million and Sweden’s is less than 10 million, so Sweden can afford to give its cows a holiday.

Yes, Swedish law requires cows to spend a few hours outdoors every summer, and this holiday limits the amount of milk they can produce.

Meanwhile, Kenyan farmers extend themselves to feed their livestock through tactics like invading national parks for grazing land, while culling those animals they can’t feed.

Here in Kenya, there are mega-farms that don’t make the news. There are farmers who grow 5,000 acres of cereal in dry Ukambani on black cotton soil.

Del Monte in Makuyu has the largest pineapple plantation in the world, and there’s Ol Pejeta ranch, which has the world's largest herd of purebred Boran cattle.

Other examples are 200 farmers in Matuu who use climate-smart agriculture approaches to grow chillies for export, and dry lands near Mogotio and Tsavo where farmers grow seed maize for the country.

So let’s celebrate more malls of production as much as we highlight the malls of consumption. 

Twitter: @bankelele