Kenya and coffee have been associated globally for all my lifetime: An icon of our beauty and excellence and a mainstay of our exports. Yet now, it seems, our government is going to deliver us a coffee funeral pyre.
Second base, at least talked about, is its inability to abandon the unfair, corruption-boosting and unnecessary compulsory brokers.
Other countries don’t have middlemen, and it’s time they ceased to be obligatory — not least, because the whole system was put in place by the colonialists exactly to keep Kenyan farmers and smallholders out of coffee production chain. It needs to go.
But, first base, not even on the agenda, is that our coffee yields have plummeted. The average Kenyan smallholder cherry yield per coffee tree is now at its lowest ever, at 2-3 kg, compared with a potential 30 kg, reports the Solidaridad Network.
Why? The short, ‘no-knowledge-of-agriculture-needed-here’ answer is, ‘farmers are not getting the fertilisers they need.’ Yet shouldn’t we expect some agricultural knowledge from our government, and even more so from our Ministry of Agriculture? Inorganic fertilisers have a tiny impact on coffee yields, even when the trees aren’t suffering a new pest blight — which they are.
See just one study by Gebeyahu of over 1,100 coffee smallholders in Amhara, in 2016, that found fertiliser’s yield impact was less than 1 per cent, where organic manure increased yields by 2.4 percent, and pesticides by around 6.5 percent.
By no more possible leap of the imagination can fertilisers restore our 90 percent yield shortfall. They are meaningless. Because what is actually happening is a pest blight borne of climate change.
Kenyan coffee is grown at high altitudes, from 1400 to 2000 metres, which meant it used to be free of the world’s biggest coffee destroyer, coffee berry borer (CBB). Not now. As temperatures have risen, the growth of CBB in East Africa has leapt from an historical 1 or 2 generations a year into 5 to 10 generations a year: Making for an exponential jump in numbers. Worse still, it has swept up into higher altitudes as temperatures have risen and, thus, into the heartlands of Kenyan coffee growing.
So, what does the government do? It bans one of the only two pesticides that kill that borer beetle, making resistance to the sole chemical still allowed into a near-term certainty.
At which point, dear farmers, with or without corrupt marketing agents, enjoy your 90 percent yield losses, and let’s organise big meetings to decide which minister or president should preside over the official funeral for Kenyan coffee, and they can put a ribbon on it: No more coffee here.
