Coffee is a crop that has made people make millions of shillings in this country. The same crop is condemned by some other schools of thought as modern-day slavery. One fails to understand how people in the same country farming the same crop would have opposite beliefs about the crop they are farming.
Those who invest their resources in the crop earn more and will most likely talk positively about the crop. The opposite also holds in that those who don’t invest their resources will produce lighter coffees in low quantities that will fetch poor prices.
This latter category is the one that believes that coffee is farmed by farmers to profit from middlemen who practice modern-day slavery.
Unlike crops like tea, coffee requires substantial investment throughout the year to maximize profits. Tea requires fertilizer that is supplied mostly once in a year, but the farmer may also apply animal manure to boost the harvests. I have not seen farmers spray foliar fertilizers or pesticides on tea.
In coffee these foliar feeds are required, fertilizer is applied at least twice in a year, there are all sorts of pesticides used, diseases are many and pruning requires specialist technicians who charge the farmer. In short, for the farmer to get the cash from coffee she needs to invest lots of resources.
Most of the time the farmer is hesitant to acquire capital at a fee from the institutions because he may not be sure of how much her coffee will fetch in the market.
The coffee marketing agents, being coffee experts, got to know this well and did financing of the sector by giving advance payments before the parchment deliveries were made. With the coffee reforms, the advance payments by non-financial institutions were outlawed. It was discovered that in some instances the financing was abused making farmers incur losses.
Though the farmers had started panicking when the coffee reforms started and the Nairobi coffee exchange was not taking place, the current prices are favorable which can be partly attributed to the reforms.
Unfortunately, the sector will not gain much since the low production of coffee makes the profits to be minimal. There is a consensus in the subsector that the production per tree needs to be increased from the current two kilogramme per tree per year to above 5kgs.
We will be better if this is further increased to 15 kilograms (it is doable even within 2 years of serious farming).The fact is that two kilograms per tree is not profitable, and the farmer will always complain of slavery and low production.
The other fact is that the average farmer does not have the capital to invest for optimal production. The farmer will need adequate financing to produce more. The financing should address requirements from planting the right and improved coffee varieties to field establishment and planting to taking care of the mature trees.
There are good efforts and strategies like the cherry advance fund and the commodities fund. This must be communicated to the farmers to ensure that the funds are absorbed for the intended purposes. Since resources are always limited and the uses are unlimited, we shouldn’t assume that the two funds are adequate to revive the sector.
The private institutions including banks should come up with special products for the subsector which, if fully revived, will benefit them also. There is also a need to motivate youths to acquire financing to revive and manage the farms that belong to the aged farmers who may be exiting the coffee business.
Dr Irungu Maina