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"speaker_name": "Mr. Mututho",
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"legal_name": "John Michael Njenga Mututho",
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"content": "Today in this country, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have several groups of people who are doing extension. There is one even in Kibera here which has been on it for 17 years or thereabouts. But unless they register and we know who they are and the content development is agreed and harmonized, then we will have very serious ramifications in the overall agricultural production. To give you an example, let us take the wonderful innovation this system we had where they can grow vegetables from a sack. That is very good idea; it is an extremely good idea. You do not have to have a shamba, but you have a sack; you fill it with soil and then you are able to put some little water and then you can have very good vegetables. That is a good practice; that is very innovative, but when you do it next to a main highway, then the question of heavy metal poisoning comes in. Because even if you are doing it outside your house and that you are doing it, for instance, the Hospital Road or this road near Kenyatta National Hospital where the traffic flow is very high; or places like Valley Road, then the amount of absorbable chemicals that are likely to cause cancer that will end up in those vegetables is immense. It is just as good as growing those vegetables on a sewer line. These are the practices that the farmers should be taught by a well schooled extension worker. The Ministry of Agriculture is obviously not a dumping ground. Since it is a profession just like the doctors, then you cannot allow each and everyone to come on and start teaching the farmers on the extension practices. We have seen farmers invest millions. They try to grow macadamia nuts and aloe vera in wrong places. They also try to introduce animals that ordinarily are not suited for that particular ecosystem. They try chemicals to control conditions that would have easily been controlled by other practices. We have seen farmers suffer because in SONY zone where they grow sugar cane, they went ahead with some agents to do extension services; promising them that there was going to be massive sugar cane harvesting techniques and so forth. Ultimately, there was overproduction of the cane and they were not ready. The roads were not ready and the factory was not ready to crush it. That is when the extension workers failed. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, there is even a bigger problem and that is why we need this policy. Some of these agents do not have their own staff, but they go on and try to induce the Ministry of Agriculture staff, making them unavailable for the assignments that they are designed to do. That way then, the set objective by the Ministry is hampered, not by the numbers, but because somebody is trying to misuse and abuse their own staff. There was a time when in the guise of know and the World Bank came up with a wonderful team; that the result was not to hire any new extension officers, particular in livestock and agriculture. There came in another bigger crazy where all agricultural colleges, including the junior training colleges, were also converted to universities, military barracks or whatever they wanted to convert them to. The result was that the quality of hands-on extension workers was affected. The sources like Embu and Egerton for the diplomas got depleted, such that if today you look at the statistics that we have in terms of those students who are undergoing training in the institutions, you will find about 200 only who are at certificate level in all the institutions. They are even less when you look at the diploma level, but there is massive training in the managerial level, that is, the degree programme. The extension practices must now be controlled by a well founded policy like the one put forward in Sessional Paper No.4 by the Ministry of Agriculture. We hope that the exercise that is going on now, which is consolidating all the laws of agriculture, this policy has been put in place so that somebody like me or any hon. Member can walk in and make a telephone call and get a quality extension worker who is available to come and carry out a particular service. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, however, I am gratified to note, as the Chairman of the Departmental Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Cooperatives, that the Ministry of Agriculture, even with these stringent measures in controlling the quality of extension workers, has gone ahead and made it possible for people and farmers to continue getting free extension services. What we are saying, basically, is that if, for instance, in Naivasha, you have a team of about ten extension workers, they will be available for a particular purpose. But if you want them to work extra time to give you consultancy, there is a guideline on how that matter will be conducted. That policy is what we have been missing from 1963. In the 1980s, there was a very aggressive move in what they called Training and Visit (T & V), where an extension worker had a route where he could go round at a particular time and meet a group of farmers. After that, we have had other systems which have been tried. All of them, somehow, have not yielded the results that were envisaged, just because of these multitude extension workers. Soon or later, we will have similar problems with the very many psychiatrists and everybody else who will do counseling. But before we reach there, we should emulate this good work by the Ministry of Agriculture, to produce a policy that now recognizes extension services as a profession by itself. This is where people will have to go and do certain things in principles which are internationally acknowledged. For instance, without turning this to be a science congress, if you do good husbandry, plough your land in good time, you want to plant maize, you have everything in place which includes fertilizer and good quality of seeds and you plant two weeks after the onset of rains, you will lose 25 per cent of anticipated production. That is such basic information which can be passed on to a farmer. The farmer may be on a safari or gone for a wedding ceremony and hence, delaying to plant for 14 days--- Although he may have had the right seeds and fertilizer, he will lose a quarter of what would be the anticipated produce. Of course, that has to go with complicated science or soil temperature, how the weeds germinate, nitrogen flash and so forth. But, ultimately, the farmer needs to be told that he or she should do dry planting just one or two days before the onset of the rains. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other practice which you know and which is widely known is that even pests which hustles a farmer, using some of the plants that are there in the field, can be controlled using organic substances which are within the farmer’s own reach. Such products can be done cheaply and you will end up having a very good product. An example is using tobacco, some families which are from the family of cannabis, pyrethrene formulation and so on. An extension worker will be able to do that at household level. A lady who produces tomatoes this season and has not been taught how to preserve that, will still continue having a poorly fed family although they had that crop a few days ago. Technologies do exist regarding the drying of maize. The Ministry of Agriculture, from 1972 or thereabouts, has had something called “extension services”. It even has an agricultural information centre. It also has a mobile agricultural information centre and extension service. All those things are there, but the art of communicating the same to the farmer in a format that can be understood by qualified people and in an affordable manner; always trying to provide it as cheaply as it can be, is a challenge. That challenge has been addressed in this particular policy. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I urge the hon. Members not to be frightened by the feeling that at one point, everything will be very commercial. This is because even the private schools that we have today do not stop the Government from providing free primary and secondary education. But let us envisage and support this particular policy, so that the Ministry of Agriculture or the big giant that one time, in 1976, was described by one newspaper, The Nation, in an editorial that if they were to make up their mind – it was on a Sunday and the editorial was by Joe Kadhi - and mobilized all the vehicles and personnel they had, they could liberate Zimbabwe or Rhodesia at that particular time. They were so many, but could not be felt and we still had food challenges. Such issues now can be resolved by us defining what they are supposed to do through this policy statement and then, incorporating this policy statement into arguably good laws, which will come to the Floor of this House in a couple of days. In seconding this Motion, I want to acknowledge the contribution by our Departmental Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Cooperatives. While I was outside, one of the Members of the Committee, Mr. Mureithi of Ol Kalou, was ready to pass the same view. I thank him for that. The Committee’s position is that we feel that this is the way to go. This is long overdue and we congratulate the Ministry for doing the right thing by defining the policies that will show us the general direction towards this extension policy. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I beg to second."
}