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{
    "id": 396160,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/396160/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 122,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Bowen",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2256,
        "legal_name": "David Kangongo Bowen",
        "slug": "david-kangongo-bowen"
    },
    "content": "Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, as many of my colleagues said, milk is a source of income for people in the rural areas. I come from a pastoral community, where we mostly survive on milk and meat. However, we do not have a market for the milk. Farmers spend most of their resources on their cows but they do not benefit from milk. The Jubilee Government talked about ensuring that we have a double-digit economic growth rate, but this cannot be realised until we revive plants like the KCC to enable us generate foreign exchange and revive our economy. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, in order for us to revive and build the milk industry, we need to look at the milk cooling systems. The Government needs to do something in every constituency. We need to have a milk cooling system in every constituency, so that we avoid wastage of milk. This is because there are some areas in the country where roads are not accessible and so milk, being a perishable commodity, does not get to the market in good time. If we can have those cooling plants, farmers will be able to store this milk for a while before they take it to the factories. Many of my colleagues have talked about water. They have said that water costs more than milk in this country. I do not think that is in order. The Government needs to do something about this in order to benefit farmers. In order to revive the milk industry in Kenya we also need to look into the issue of corruption. There are so many brokers in the dairy subsector, and so farmers do not get anything. The brokers are the ones benefiting from this milk. Look at a person who does yoghurt processing, he or she buys milk from the farmers at Kshs20 a litre, yet the price of a 500 ml packet of yoghurt is very high. We need to check the corruption in the industry. We know that KCC went down because of corruption. If the Government increases the price of milk, I think farmers will benefit more and we will have our youth employed because our industries will grow. We will have a lot of income generated for the farmers, which they will use to sponsor their children to schools. The economy of this country will grow because of the foreign exchange earnings. With those few remarks, I beg to support."
}