Before independence Kenya imported nearly all textiles from the UK, India, and Uganda. The independence government developed a major program to grow cotton in semi-arid regions, fully equipped with ginneries.
Textile industries were located in Thika, Eldoret, and Kisumu.
The Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) funded cotton growing while the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC) funded industries in partnerships with private investors. Fiscal interventions were instituted to discourage imports.
The first threat to cotton was the advent of synthetic fabrics from Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Then in the early 1990s, the IMF-prompted economic structural reforms allowed uncontrolled importation of new and old clothes.
This paralysed cotton farming and the supporting industrial infrastructure.
Today there are only two surviving textile industries at Eldoret and Thika running under-capacity and using limited quantities of locally grown cotton supplemented with cotton imports from Tanzania.
The William Ruto government's plans to multiply economic opportunities and jobs in agricultural value chains, including agro-industries, and cotton, is a ready candidate.
A recent 2020 study (cotton and pyrethrum revival ) indicated that a number of counties (Busia, Kitui, Kwale, Homa Bay, Lamu ) are ready with plans to multiply cotton production.
The adjacent counties can quickly mobilise cotton growing. Bt/GMO cotton seeds have been successfully introduced in some counties, with strong recommendations that KALRO develops high-impact Kenyan seed varieties to eventually reduce reliance on unsustainable importation.
A sure roadmap to textile industry revival should involve scaling up whatever cotton growing that is already happening in various counties.
Departments of Trade, Agriculture, and Co-operatives, and counties will need to jointly allocate resources to multiply cotton crop production, reorganise farmers' co-ops and modernise ginneries while inviting investors to participate in textile milling capacity expansion.
This way, the promised economic impacts (agricultural and industrial jobs, import substitution, and exports ) will be delivered.
In Kenya, cotton fabrics have a large niche market, which is currently unfulfilled. There is therefore no immediate need to interfere with competing second-hand clothes imports that satisfy a different market segment.
Kenya should also target exports of surplus cotton lint and fabrics to generate forex. Other by-products from ginneries are oil and cotton-seed cake, which is much needed for animal feeds formulation.
For information, I chaired the 2020 National Steering Committee that undertook the cotton/pyrethrum revival study.
I currently chair the Pyrethrum Processing Company of Kenya where we are reviving pyrethrum value chains.
