Most of my life has been devoted to the power of news, its value, and the way it can change lives. Yet how often we lose our way in informing decisions and shaping a better future. For take as a single example, our sugar industry.
Sugar begins with farmers, a quarter of a million of them in Kenya, growing sugar cane, and suffering the first information gap of all. Nearly all of them are using old and low yielding cane varieties, with over 40 percent of them using just one cane seed, known as Co 945.
Altogether, 94 percent of the sugar cane we grow is from four kinds of old-fashioned seeds, all of which are slow to mature, with low sucrose content (as in, not much sugar) and high susceptibility to major diseases, such as smut, mosaic and ratoon stunting.
Logically, we shouldn’t be cultivating these seeds at all. There are 13 other, high-yielding varieties developed by the Kenya Sugar Research Foundation (Kesref) and released for commercial production years ago, some of them decades ago. These mature early, with more sucrose, and far greater disease resistance.
Yet fewer than one in 16 farmers use any of them. Indeed, the adhesion to old and low yielding seeds is the single greatest reason for Kenya’s low sugar yields, which run at around 55.1 tonnes per hectare - compared with 74.3 t/ha in Mauritius and 95.1 t/ha in Egypt.
We have more and better land for sugar growing than either of those nations, but before we get even one step further than putting seed into the land, we have already moved ourselves to the back of the competition.
Now, there’s where I have an issue as a journalist. Shouldn’t that be news? We have 94 percent of 250,000 smallholders, on whom many others also depend, so a sum of several million Kenyans, who are slashing their own productivity on a poor seed choice.
In the Western media, if millions were hurting themselves by doing anything, it would make headlines, features and a drumbeat of media coverage. But no, silence.
Given the chance, I would, for sure, make it my business to write stories every season, every year, and of every variety about those seed cane choices. I would report the trend in seeds, I would investigate and interview nurseries, I would write about the nurseries growing new varieties and about the transformation for farmers in the six per cent who have found out that high-yield equals a lot more income.
With channels and time, I could get a lot of Kenyans to search for KEN 82 – 216 as a means to doubling their livelihood. I could get entrepreneurs interested in propagating KEN 82 -216 as a high value seed. I could write about how to get the seed stock, and how to succeed as a high-yield seed supplier.
And the impact would be phenomenal. It would lift GDP. It would save Sh15 billion we spent last year on sugar imports, reducing our trade deficit and improving the value of the Kenyan shilling.
Indeed, just that little thread of coverage around cane seed would change our rural areas, our west, our schools, and councils, and local economies.
Truly, if it were about how many people are affected, how many lives are changed, how big the difference for our whole nation – and the journalism gurus I grew up to used to claim these were the dictators of news value and of what came top of the news list - then a shift in sugar cane seeds should make front page news.
But it doesn’t. Kenyans on Twitter don’t seem to care about our old, elderly, and aging cane seeds that are making millions poor. Our journalists don’t care either. Instead, we have to read about Dennis Itumbi, and his friends on police benches, and fantastical stories as the power hungry compete for more power.
But if we took our eyes off the power, and moved them to the hungry, truly we would change our world. That’s my own dream anyway. But whatever. Back to a fake letter. I guess that’s news, for some reason that escapes me.
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