Kenya has one of the highest numbers of subsistence farmers. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Subdivision of land continues to undermine agricultural productivity and remains a threat to the achievement of the Big Four Agenda.
Agriculture has over the decades been a key driver of the Kenyan economy as well as a top foreign exchange earner. This position continues to be undermined by the continued sub-division of arable land. A majority of Kenyan communities still bury their dead on tiny farms; build houses on ever shrinking pieces of land and urbanisation has seen previously rich agricultural lands turned into concrete jungles.
As a result, the country has one of the highest numbers of subsistence farmers.
At Independence, the clamour for land ownership was real, and a key driving force behind the freedom fight.
Every citizen aspired and looked forward to owning a piece of land. Nobody thought this would harm the economy in the long run, as it has.
The land issue continues to be a highly emotive subject and successive governments have been afraid to tackle it. Politicians are still campaigning for ‘Watu Wetu Wapewe Mashamba’ (our people should be given land).
Eighty percent of the once thriving coffee, tea, sugar, milk, sunflower, sisal, cotton and horticulture sectors have since been killed. Yet even the surviving sectors such as the milk and sugar sectors operate on deficit as imports supplement local production. We are literally running agriculture down.
Extensive land reforms are necessary if the country is to realise a functional agricultural system and enhance productivity; to move Kenya from being a net importer to a net exporter of agricultural produce and by-products.
The government should come up with a framework of leasing back farms from the people in a land consolidation drive. The premise would be to build clustered, well-serviced residential areas within each locality, and consolidate the land pieces into agriculturally viable blocks.
The issue of land being touchy as it is in Kenya, there will not only be a need for a strong government policy, but also appropriate incentives for the people to surrender their lands without resistance.
A ‘Land Consolidation Fund’ should be put in place to spearhead the leasing of land from citizens, transfer residents to a planned settlement area which is well serviced with amenities such as water, waste disposal, power, and schools.
The land thus vacated is then flattened for commercial enterprise, into which the residents can be absorbed to provide both skilled and semi-skilled labour. Such blocks, which will be in the sizes of at least 10,000 acres, are viable units for viable agricultural activity;.
Some farms can be designated to produce for local consumption specifically, while a large chunk of the farms produce for the export market.
For sustainability, the farms should be co-owned through a tripartite agreement where the government owns about 25 percent of the shares, a strategic investor to steer the commercial enterprise with a majority shares (at least 60 percent), and the community taking at least 15 percent.
The writer is managing director/CEO of CPF Group.
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