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{
    "id": 1088285,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1088285/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 174,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Murkomen",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 440,
        "legal_name": "Onesimus Kipchumba Murkomen",
        "slug": "kipchumba-murkomen"
    },
    "content": "Madam Temporary Speaker, this should then give an opportunity to a more independent institution in the Capital Markets Authority (CMA) to now look and oversight all the commodities exchange related to coffee matters. It may seem a small and easy exercise. Even this House may be having few Members during this important debate, but I can tell you for people who understand the importance of cash crops like coffee and tea, are few. This is a very serious Bill. In fact, this is the most honourable thing we can do here. We are dismantling cartels and giving power back to the farmer. We are debating and saying we want the farmers to have the control of where their crops go, at a better price and have money in their pockets. Madam Temporary Speaker, currently, we are having a debate about the economy from different perspectives in this country. Our friends in the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) are talking about a top-down approach. Theirs is about building big industries, buy Kenya products and so on. I do not want to annoy them, but they were the ones who used tell us that we should not buy any products from Brookside, Safaricom and from all these other companies. Be it as it may, they have now seen the light. They are saying that we build big companies and its effects will trickle down. Madam Chair, those of us who believe that we need to do a bottom-up approach have an anti-thesis approach. President Biden talks about a bottom-up, middle-wide approach where we ensure that the small-scale farmers, however few they are, or notwithstanding the size of their farms, can benefit through a cooperative society that brings together all these farmers because they will mill their coffee themselves. They have a right to mill their coffee and get whoever wants to buy their coffee at a price they want themselves. Madam Chair, if you are going to have a commodity exchange for that coffee, let it be regulated by the CMA like other products are being regulated in the market. That is reform and transformation. That is where we want to go as a country. If we have to go there, we need to dismantle the cartels. I have an interest in this sector, and I have been taking lessons from, Madam Chair---"
}