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{
    "id": 526428,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/526428/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 260,
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    "content": "Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the next area we should be looking at is the value addition in potatoes. The primitive old days when potatoes used to be boiled or roasted and partaken whole, are long gone. Our children are now eating French fries or potato chips. In future, we will not just be eating ugali from maize flour. We are going to be eating potato ugali . When I spent sometime out of the country, there were packages in the supermarket called “hungry jack”. That was potato flour that used to sell in the supermarket when it was half cooked. All you needed to do is boil water, put in the flour and you have instant mashed potatoes. Instead of our ladies spoiling their nails peeling potatoes, we are going to be just picking a packet of flour from the shelf and making instant mashed potatoes. The days of transporting huge bags from Nyandarua to Nairobi are going to be soon over. We will be transporting packaged potato flour and chips from Nyandarua to Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and other places. I am not talking about theoretical things; when we travelled to Brazil late last year, I was interested in agriculture and we found that the staple food in Brazil is cassava. So, instead of eating maize meal, we ate cassava flour in Brazil. There were machines which they used for processing that cassava flour. I looked at the machine, which was worth about Kshs200 million; the machine does not only make the flour, it also makes starch out of the cassava while the zero waste products are used to make animal feed. So, my friend, Sen. (Eng.) Karue, I think you should travel to Brazil. Those machines can be adapted and they can be used for making industrial starch from the potatoes in Nyandarua and in my own county. When you see a tablet that white, it is really just starch which is used as a carrier for the chemical substances inside it. So, there is no reason why we cannot make that industrial starch from our potatoes in this country. So, I see Sen. (Eng.) Muriuki and other Senators who come from potato-producing counties are very lucky because we are going to be major producers of starch for the industries in this country. There are animals all over which need animal feed. We are going to use potato peels and other potato wastes to make animal feed. We will sell this animal feed to those who have those animals and in the long run, we are going to improve our livestock in this country. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, in addition to value addition, I think time has come for us to look at the entire potato governance system, and that is why Clause 6 is important. We have been debating whether we should have a potato council, a potato Bill or a potato board, just like the Pyrethrum Board of Kenya or what kind of organization we should have. As we proposed in the Committee, we moved away from the council because there is another potato council which is a private sector body registered under the Companies Act. We do not want any competition with that council and so, we had suggested that it be called a Potato Board. We have been consulting with the Government and the trend at policy level for the Government is to move away from the creation of new parastatals. They are even amalgamating the ones that exist at the moment. So, instead of us having a Potato Board, it is being proposed that the potatoes be under a directorate under the Crops The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}