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"id": 2270,
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"speaker_name": "Dr. Kones",
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"legal_name": "Julius Kipyegon Kones",
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I also rise to support this Motion. I can see my friend, Mrs. Odhiambo-Mabona, smiling. I do not know whether she also grows tea. I want to congratulate my colleague, Dr. Khalwale, for bringing this Motion to the House. The Motion is timely. As the various speakers have said, tea remains the major foreign exchange earner for this country. Therefore, I would expect the Government to put in more resources into this sector because it is the backbone of our economy. My worry is on the way the Government seems to deal with tea issues. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this morning, I asked a Question relating to the Tea (Amendment) Bill that we passed in this House, and I was not impressed by the way the Assistant Minister responded to that Question, because he looked so casual. He did not appear like someone who felt for the ordinary tea farmers, who are, really, the backbone of the economy of this country. The Assistant Minister should be aware that tea is now the leading foreign exchange earner. The leading foreign exchange earner for this country is no longer tourism or horticulture. It is tea, yet we do not seem to do anything to promote tea farmers, so that they can produce more tea. The challenges facing tea farmers are many. If you come to my constituency, you will see that between 65 per cent and 70 per cent of the area is under tea production. I have been unable to explain why the poverty rate remains very high in that area despite the fact that tea earns this country the biggest amount in foreign exchange. It beats all mathematical formulae that we cannot correlate the high poverty rate to the high foreign exchange earnings realised by this country through tea. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, let me suggest that apart from the Government writing off all debts owed by farmers in the various tea factories, the Government also needs to go further and support other activities that affect the cost of production of tea. In my constituency, and in my neighbouring constituency of Bomet, there is overproduction of tea. That area requires two or three new factories to cope with the production of tea there. We want to urge the Government to come in and put up tea factories. The Government should give funds to the KTDA to start up additional factories in those areas as a matter of urgency, because there is tea. We are producing tea but there is nowhere to process that tea. The Government needs money. Why does the Government not put money in those areas to facilitate processing of more tea and earn more foreign exchange for this country? Another area I would like the Government to come into is to support the farmers in terms of transportation. One way of doing this would be to support the co-operative societies that farmers own by purchasing for them trucks for transportation of tea from their areas. Most of our farmers cannot afford to buy new trucks. The KTDA seems to have failed to manage its transportation system. I think it is the role of the Government to come in and support farmers to purchase trucks for transporting tea from the farms to the factories. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as regards fertilizers, the Government needs to find a way of working with the KTDA to ensure that farmers get fertilizer at competitive prices. Another problem we have in our area, on which I can speak with a lot of authority and with all the facts, is that there has been collusion between officials of the KTDA and some unscrupulous traders to falsify data on fertilizer supply to farmers. I have a very classic case of a farmer who owns a quarter of an acre of tea crop. He had taken three bags of fertilizer but in the payslip that he was given during the tea bonus payment, it was indicated that he had 64 bags of fertilizers. Therefore, on the Kshs120,000 bonus that he was supposed to earn, he needed to add another Kshs60,000, just because of the error and mismanagement in fertilizer distribution. This is an area I really want the Government to come into. Over the time, the Government has been hiding behind a statement that the KTDA is a private company; and that it is in the interest of the Ministry to look after the interests of the farmers. The Ministry is the overall prefect. Could the Government come in and find a way of streamlining the supply and distribution of fertilizer to ensure that farmers get inputs at the right prices, and that farmers are not charged for fertilizers they have not taken from the KTDA? Another point is on electricity and my colleague, Mr. Keter, mentioned it here. We really need to support our small-scale factories to generate power. In most of the areas where tea is grown, there are rivers which have the capacity to generate power. In my constituency, we have the capacity to generate enough power to run our factories and even have excess power to sell. Unfortunately, there has been lack of vision and proper planning not only by the KTDA, but also by the Government. The mistake is that some people with vested interests either within the Government or KTDA are using the same projects for power generation to start their own power projects from which farmers are completely removed. What we have done in my constituency is to mobilize the farmers to register themselves and then start projects. I am glad that UNIDO came in to assist the farmers, and they have started a power project. I believe it will be the first hydro-power generation run and managed by the locals in my constituency. It will be the first and the only one in the country. I would like to invite the Minister to make a tour in my constituency and we will show him how to do it. He could then replicate it elsewhere. This will reduce the cost of power in the factories. I would like the Ministry to take this seriously. Most of our factories use firewood as a source of power. There is not enough land to plant trees. However, we have designated forest areas which you can allocate to the tea factories to plant trees---"
}