Challenges facing Farmers in Kenya

Marketing of smallholder produce is a major challenge in much of Africa especially following liberalization. Farmers face exploitative and unreliable markets for most of their produce.Approximately 80% of Kenya’s population of 30 million people is rural dwellers who depend wholly on agriculture and fisheries for survival. According to the Ministry of Agriculture’s Strategy for Revitalizing Agriculture (SRA) for the Years 2004 – 2014, 87% of the poor households not only live in the rural areas and depend on agriculture, but over 50% of those households are food insecure. The agriculture in Kenya contributes 26% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP); similarly, this sector contributes a further 27% through linkages with the manufacturing, distribution and service-related sectors. This contrasts sharply with the fact that there is significant potential for increased agricultural production, which has not been fully exploited.

Agricultural production and performance in Kenya has been experiencing a steady decline since over the last two decades. During the 1960s and 1970s growth in agricultural production stood at an average of 6%. This growth declined to 3.5% a decade later and during the last decade, it plummeted further to 1.3%. While this agricultural growth rate declined sharply on the one hand, the corresponding population growth rate stood at a national average of 2.9% within the same decade.

The following are some of the main factors that accounted for poor agricultural production and performance.

• Unfavourable micro and macro-economic environment.
• Inappropriate legal and regulatory frameworks.
• Inadequate financial services.
• Inadequate storage and processing capacity for agricultural produce.
• Weak and ineffective-extension-farmers linkages.
• Poor coordination with other support sectors such as water, roads, energy and security.
• Natural disasters occasioned by floods, droughts, pests and disease outbreaks.
• Poor governance within key institutions supporting agriculture.
• Declining soil fertility and pervasive agricultural practices.

A Farmer shows of the fruits of adopting new maize varieties promoted by SACRED Africa at Range, Bungoma Kenya.Out of this gloomy picture, the agriculture sector can be salvaged through a number of purposive interventions. One possibility is to conscientiously raise the agricultural productivity through efficient participatory on-farm and community based research and effective extension service support that targets the food insecure rural households. A second possibility is to develop legal frameworks that support and encourage participatory, bottom-up approaches to development. Such approaches need to engender the political good will and enabling economic environment to succeed. The bottom-line of doing this is essentially to empower the local rural communities to initiate and implement their own priority agro-based projects.

Besides, deliberate efforts need to be engineered for encouraging the diversification of food and cash crop production as a way of stabilizing local and national food reserves in order open up value- adding income opportunities for the resource poor farmers. Furthermore, smallholder farmers need to be encouraged through confidence building measures and capacity building so that they operate in organized structures, learn user-friendly technical and social skills and initiate both income-saving and income generating agricultural enterprises.

THE NEED FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

One possible panacea for some of the factors aggravating poverty outlined above is recourse to sustainable development. This is the development that is all encompassing, that advocates for harnessing, nurturing and utilizing all resources-physical, natural, social and the environment in a way that allows the regeneration of these resources. Sustainable development must ensure the release of the physical power of the people and their environment; their productive, organizing and intellectual power.

Sustainable development facilitates the growth of mutually beneficial and supportive relationships amongst all the parties concerned. It is in this context that the NGOs like SACRED Africa that are painstaking promoting development through sustainable agriculture become extremely relevant and are better placed to make an impact in communities where they operate.

Understanding of Challenges with Sustainable Agriculture

SACRED Africa understands the problems of smallholder farmers as revolving around a number of factors, which are basically inter-related. Such factors combine and confound the problems of the resource poor smallholder farmers. The problems include, but are not necessarily restricted to, the following:

a) Inadequate awareness characterized by low levels of empowerment and civic inertia.

b) Non-existent technologies that can be adapted to smallholder sustainable agricultural practices.

c) The vagaries of liberalized marketing of cereals among other farm products, characterized by poor pricing of farm produce and the ever-present menace of exploitation perpetrated by merchants of profit, also called middlemen/women.

d) Poor marketing strategies and market outlets.

e) Unorganized structures for decision-making and lack of collective action by the farmers.

f) Inadequate access to healthcare in rural settings for responding to common diseases or epidemics, which dissipate the productive potential of the farmers.

g) Inability to access credit and other productive resources in the form of farm inputs.

h) Poor agricultural extension services that hardly reach the rural smallholder farmers.

i) Agricultural policies that favour the large and medium scale farmers coupled with top-down on-station research approaches that are unsuitable to smallholder farmers.

For more details contact the Director, SACRED Africa at sacred@africaonline.co.ke (c) 2009 SACRED Africa