23 coffee factories face audit as State mulls closure of co-operatives

Nyeri County has been picked to pioneer efforts to revive coffee production in the country. Among the measures is to cut down on the number of co-operatives to retain the strong ones.

At least 23 coffee factories are being audited by the special team consisting of national and county officials from the department of co-operatives and agriculture.

Simon Kuria, who is leading the audit team, said performance will include collection of data on the status of the coffee factories in the county that will also inform crafting of policies that would govern the sector.

“We shall be visiting the co-operatives and audit their books looking into how debts were accrued,” he said. A meeting in the county concurred that what is urgently needed in the coffee sector is not value addition, but to optimise production, get demand for the produce and ensure the farmer gets at least 80 per cent of market proceeds.

According to trade and industry principal secretary Peter Munya, the region will be used as a platform to launch a case study of optimised productivity to be replicated in other growing areas.

Munya said there has been a series of meetings with Nyeri County stakeholders to map out the strategy to give the sector a new lease of life.

“We will lay strategies to inject government support in production (husbandry) and productivity (volumes) and follow it up with effective market structures. We will come up with a time frame to achieve the desired results of bringing back the earning sparkle for our farmers,” he said last week.

Other areas of focus will be distribution of free fertiliser to farmers, issuance of seedlings, data collection that will tell the kind of intervention the factories need, rehabilitation of the factory that will focus on refurbishing the fermentation tank to eliminate coffee stinkers that compromise the quality of coffee.

Nyeri Senator Ephraim Maina said the country has in the past 40 years lost 85 per cent of its coffee production to bad policies and disorganised market structures where brokers have dominated the value chain.

“Nyeri farmers have been consistent in coffee production and striving to achieve quality volumes. They are the leading lot in earnings where some factories have been paying as high as Sh130 per kilo. These are the indicators that informed the president to pick our county as a launching pad to national coffee revitalisation programme,” he said.

He said key to the plan will be scaling down farmers’ co-operative societies to retain big movements that will give the farmer market bargaining power and also reduce overheads to increase earning rates.
Former Nyeri Woman representative Priscilla Nyokabi is already tackling the legal handicaps surrounding the coffee sector.

“We are aware that the president in 2016 appointed a task force on coffee sub-sector reforms headed by Prof Joseph Kieya to research and make recommendations on how best to revitalise the coffee sector,” she said. But the taskforce’s report was barred from being implemented by Justice George Odunga on August 2, 2017 on grounds that it failed to conduct proper public participation and involve county governments.

Justice Odunga gave the 2017/2022 parliament 30 days upon swearing in to put in place measures of salvaging the report from being trashed, an issue that was not addressed. But Ms Nyokabi said her working committee has since written to the judiciary seeking leave on the Odunga judgement as efforts to rectify the grey areas that resulted to the ruling get addressed.

“We are in partnership with the judiciary on this issue. We will salvage the recommendations and conform to the Justice Odunga ruling,” she said. This comes after a section of farmers from coffee growing zones oppose clauses of the recommended coffee reforms.