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"id": 248392,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/248392/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Wetangula",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs",
"speaker": {
"id": 210,
"legal_name": "Moses Masika Wetangula",
"slug": "moses-wetangula"
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"content": " Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this Bill. First of all, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I will start by congratulating Dr. Ojiambo for her passionate support for cotton growing in this country. Indeed, both Dr. Ojiambo and I come from a cotton-growing area. The Bill before the House is an attempt to improve the cotton industry, but it does not go far enough. I hope that the Minister for Agriculture, the line Ministry, in their response, will try to enrich this Bill. The most critical content in this Bill is the creation of the authority. I agree that we need an authority, but the Ministry should give its input to ensure that we do not have an authority that will be loaded by persons who are unproductive; an authority that will just be another load on the farmer. The proposed authority looks like a sector representative board and Dr. Ojiambo has even gone further to propose that the representation be provincial and other stakeholders. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, running through the Bill, there is one thing that Dr. Ojiambo has omitted, and which the Minister should bring in to enrich the Bill; the members of this authority board have no qualifications! I hope we do not get to a situation where we load the board with everybody and anybody who just goes there to sit, doze, yawn, earn allowances and go home. Clause 5 of the Bill does not give a provision as to who qualifies to be a member of the board. When we leave things fluid like this, you will find some of our colleagues here pushing their hangers on and all manner of fellows to the board and this will not be good for the industry. We need qualified people who know what it means to grow cotton, who understand the plight of the farmers and who know how to market cotton so that the industry can be revived. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Bill also attempts to bring back price controls. I would like to discourage Dr. Ojiambo from following this route. We are in a liberalized economy and we cannot create a board whose functions include price fixing. This is not right because we are in a free market economy and we do not want to tie the farmers to unreasonable pricing structures that we have seen in other crops like sugar-cane and so on, where the farmers never get value for money because they are tied to cartels built in the law that fix prices. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the cotton industry in this country has been neglected for a long time. I hope that the Minister will take the window created by Dr. Ojiambo in this Bill to have a much broader look at the industry. To revamp the cotton industry, we need a multi-sectoral approach. We need something to do with the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) on research. We need quality seeds. This must be a product of research. The Kenya Seed Company must be brought on board. We need KARI and all other stakeholders that are involved in the production of quality seeds. Currently, the farmers grow cotton, remove the lint, and they are left with the seed. That is the same seed that they plant. This undermines the yield. Secondly, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the Government has been putting a lot of money in various crop developments. For example, we have the Sugar Development Levy in the sugar industry. We have support for the tea and coffee industries and so on. Apart from creating the board, I would urge Dr. Ojiambo to go a little further and establish ways and means within the law on how the cotton farmers can be assisted. We also need to address the cotton industry by looking at the co-operative societies. Most cotton ginneries in this country are owned or were previously June 6, 2006 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 1135 owned by the co-operative societies. They were mismanaged and looted. They have all collapsed. As we try to revive the cotton industry, how do we help the farmer through co-operative societies to revive their interests and capacity to run the co-operative societies and benefit from them? I think we also need to address this issue. I hope that when the Minister comes to respond, he should go beyond the provisions that Dr. Ojiambo has put in the draft Bill and give us provisions that will really help the farmers to take control of the cotton industry right from the issue of seed quality, all the way to the production and marketing of the lint and, above all, the ginnery and textile industry which depend on cotton. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, cotton is one of the crops that ordinary Kenyans, particularly in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), can benefit from the growth of the economy. This is a crop which even a farmer who grows half-an-acre or one acre can, within three to four months, be able to harvest the crop and get some proceeds out of it. The level of neglect seen in people who have vested in this sector in this country is inexplicable. I hope that this is now going to give us a new beginning to move to assist the cotton farmers. Hand in hand with that, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, although it is not part of this Bill, I want to urge the Minister for Agriculture to reign in on those who have run down farmers' assets in terms of ginneries in this country. Successive Governments in this country have spent a lot of money establishing co-operative societies and ginneries for farmers. The middlemen moved in and ran down these ginneries leaving the farmers high and dry, stranded and unable to do anything with the crop. Eventually, the cotton industry collapsed. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as you know, cotton farming is one of the easiest and cheapest in this country. If the Ministry of Agriculture allocated a district, like Bungoma, about Kshs30 million to Kshs40 million per annum, we would be able to assist in the revival of the industry. There are other areas like South Nyanza where Eng. Okundi comes from, Makueni, upper eastern areas and Baringo. We have lots of capacity to grow cotton. All we need is just a little support. The little support that I would want the Ministry of Agriculture to bring to this Amendment Bill is provision of extension officers. These are officers who can guide the farmer on the nature and quality of seed; the time of planting, the crop husbandry, the harvesting, post-harvest management and marketing of the crop. Eventually, the farmer needs advise on how to deal with the income from the crop. If all these things were done, then the Board that Dr. Ojiambo is trying to create in this Act will have a meaningful and satisfactory job to execute. Otherwise, we may create a white elephant that will do nothing. We may have a board that will end up spending money from the industry for no job done. This is so because the board will sit there. If they have no other legal framework to support them to execute their duty up to the ordinary farmer, the board will be meaningless. Finally, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to emphasise that we must, when we go to Committee Stage, either through the Minister himself or Dr. Ojiambo, get the qualifications of whom she wants to serve on this board so that we do not just have people filling up boards because they are connected to some of us. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}