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"content": "(Mr. Omingo): Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this Motion. I want to echo the sentiments expressed by my colleagues in this House that the Minister is doing a commendable job. Let the truth be said. Let us give him the encouragement and the support that he requires to turn this country around. The economy of this country is agricultural based. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we cannot pretend to be an independent nation and secure, if we cannot feed our people. To echo the Minister's sentiment at one time, a country that cannot feed its people is like a country that is at war with itself. That is exactly what we must do to give support to the agricultural sector in terms of improving our well being. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, we all understand that if people are well nutritioned, our medical bills will go down. This is a fact! We need, therefore, to improve the quality of our food. We should have sufficient food to feed our people. Therefore, additional funding to the agricultural sector is actually welcome, so that we do not become a consuming economy, but an economy that grows to develop itself in terms of the expansion of agriculture. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, it is critical for us, as a nation, to embrace modern farming techniques. It is not space science to embrace modern farming techniques, particularly where I come from. The land acreage is actually reducing in sizes that cannot be viable. I request the Government, which I happen to be part of, to form a kind of multi-sectoral committee which will include the Ministry of Lands, Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Finance, and develop some villages to decongest highly productive areas to make them available for farming. By doing that, we can be able to centralise services for a particular sector or a market place where we can be able to supply electricity, sanitary facilities and farmers and individual owners can take their farms in a collective form and own them as shares. That is also an issue of culture that we must embrace in terms of bringing on board the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture to educate our people. If you have buried your father on the same land, you must not live there. That is the problem of culture that we have. So, we should embrace the Ministry of Lands, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of National Heritage and Culture. We will be able to educate our people and form a nucleus or a particular market centre where available land or acreage will be mechanised to be able to produce good results. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, agro-processing is the key, particularly in the sugar sector, which is really hurting. Reforms in the sugar sector are actually overdue. Where I come from in Kisii, Gucha and Nyanza, farmers go to the field, plant, weed and wait for somebody to harvest and, time on end, nothing happens! The same farmer who has ten acres of sugar-cane stands by your doorstep October 29, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3139 to demand or request for fees for the children, when his sugar-cane is flowering on the farm! When sugar-cane flowers on the farms beyond 18 months, the sucrose content comes down to the extent that it is not worth even an investment again! That demoralises the farmers to the extent that they actually end up burning the cane to plant maize. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the same thing is happening in the tea sector. Therefore, areas like South Nyanza and Kisii require three factories with the capacity of Sony Sugar Factory to make sense. That is because we produce 18,000 tonnes crushed per day (TCDs), when Sony can only crush 4,000 tonnes! Therefore, 14,000 tonnes go to waste annually! That is a serious joke and we must embrace modern farming techniques and agriculture. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, River Nile flows from this country, down to Lake Victoria and then to Egypt. We buy fruits from Egypt. It is high time that we negotiate the treaty of the River Nile, and divert that water! Unless we actually have our people benefitting from that water in terms of modern farming techniques, it is a shame that we can go and buy fruits from Egypt, while we are the source of the water. It is an embarrassment and I think it cannot pass the test of modern times! This is a nation that is a centre of excellence in East Africa and the rest of Africa. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in the tea sector, when farmers agonise, they have a reason! Please, hear them! I think the Minister has been trying to give them a hearing. We want the farmers to be heard and given value for their hard labour. That is because the bonus payment is actually skewed! In some areas, without mentioning names, our tea is used, after being exported, to blend other teas to improve their quality in the international market. It is high time that we also improved our tea processing. We should brand our tea so that I do not have to go to the United Kingdom to drink \"English Breakfast Tea\" when that tea actually comes from Kenya! It is a shame! Therefore, we need to brand our products in order to get their full value. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, in the area of flower farming, I support a speaker who said here that we need to have subsidies in terms of supporting our farmers. We also need to re-engineer some of the products that we produce. We require some brand of unique products that can hit the international market. For example, with flowers, a single long stem exported to Russia gets a better yield or payment of about US$50 per stem, as opposed to a bouquet that you send to Netherlands and get US$20. So, we need to have a fresh re-engineering of ourselves and the best way to do that is to embrace modern farming, processing and branding techniques, so that our people can appreciate what we actually produce. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, on the dairy industry, we can do better than we are doing today! In the earlier days, I used to see boys and girls who used to provide Artificial Insemination (AI) services. These days, I hardly see any clashes anywhere to the extent that the cows that we had that were humpless--- Today, we have long-horned animals simply because the quality of AI services in this country has deteriorated! We require quality hybrid semen and not those ones that are carried in archaic conditions and before they get to Naivasha, those things are usually dead before they land on those sides of western Kenya! You, therefore, wait for a calf to come and it never comes simply because the handling techniques and the quality of the seed is actually archaic and, therefore, we end up having people keeping bulls. Before the gentlemen or ladies come to serve the cows, the small bulls would have done the job much earlier because they have a sense of smell! You know what it takes. Therefore, we require to improve our animal husbandry, so that the quality of our semen is improved. That way, our people will get high yields for purposes of self sufficiency. As I said earlier, the medical bills will go down. Infertility will go down if the people are well fed and we shall all be rich! Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other day, I was on an agri-business trip in Eldoret. It is amazing how farmers are given a back burner! It is high time we invested in our farmers and gave them value for their money. We should reward them! It is a question of poor yields that people are 3140 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES October 29, 2008 turning to white collar jobs to be able to earn a decent living, which is not so decent! But our people have buried their heads in the sand assuming that, when you go to toil in the farms and there are no yields, it is better to sit in the office, earn peanuts and wait for the month-end. That way, you are not embarrassed and you do not lose out in terms of efforts and wastage in terms of producing and you do not get sufficient yields. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, with those few remarks, I beg to support."
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