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"content": "Secondly and very fundamentally, we need to encourage the country whether through private enterprise or State arrangement, that 50 years after Independence, we must have a fertiliser factory in this country. We are not going to have a fertiliser factory from the way I am seeing each county governor signing an MOU with some briefcase trader from some country that they will set up a factory. In a country like Kenya, where only 23 per cent of our land mass, is, in fact, arable and for high potential farming, how many factories of fertilisers can we have? This is where there is failing of the national Government in guiding policy, because industry is a shared responsibility between the national Government and the county governments. If the country really wants to have a mega fertiliser factory, like the dream of Ken-Ren - I agree with Sen. Kiraitu that Ken-Ren may have died at the hands and at the heart of corruption, but the dream of Ken-Ren was not buried with Ken-Ren. The dream remains that, Kenya requires a good fertiliser plant. Now that we have this news that we have oil and we are likely to have oil in commercial quantities, petrol and chemical productions are what produces fertiliser. If we are able to have a fertiliser plant in this country, it will be able to not only serve our farmers at very affordable rates, but it will also be able to bring in foreign exchange by exporting fertiliser to our neighbours. Out there, every single villager- there is a programme, run by some American Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) or some British NGO called One Acre Fund. This programme is phenomenal and the Chairman of the Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Committee will be interested to hear that this One Acre Fund Programme, has actually helped some farmers produce up to 40 bags of maize on an acre, just by applying very simple common sense, not even technology. Like the population of the crop on a acre, the spacing, the amount of quantum of fertiliser to be applied and so forth. I remember when we were growing up, there used to be villagers, I said on the Floor here called Karakacha, who used to come to our villages. They would come and tell us that we need to have a straight line and a hole after a foot and put this amount of quantum. We used teaspoons to put fertiliser in those holes to plant. These days, you see somebody with oxen making a farrow, somebody following with fertiliser and spreading without knowing the amount of quantum. There, there is somebody throwing seeds of maize and at the end of the day, some seeds are falling where there is no fertiliser. At the end of the day, there is no crop. We need technical knowledge and information to be given to the farmer. We want also to encourage that the Maputo Declaration that I mentioned that obligates African Governments to put a minimum of 10 per cent of their Gross National Budget to agriculture, be encouraged to cascade down to counties. Of course, we cannot say one shoe fits every size, because what is good for Nakuru County may not necessarily be the same for Marsabit County. Their priorities may be different, but where a county is agricultural in its activities, we should obligate them as well to adhere to the Maputo Protocol of 10 per cent of their gross budget going into agriculture. As we do this, there is always the potent monster lurking around called corruption; budgets are made for subsidy, they end up subsiding individuals. Budgets are meant to help the farmers and they end up helping non-farmers. Budgets are meant to help the dispossessed, they end up helping the 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"
}