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{
    "id": 55493,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/55493/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 370,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "The Assistant Minister for Education (",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "Prof. Olweny): Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir. I would like to support this Motion. This is a good Motion and I congratulate the hon. Member who came up with the idea that we should put up local factories to manufacture fertilizers. Kenya is a food deficient county. We have serious food insecurity in this country. The incidences of Kenyans dying of hunger are always with us. One of the factors leading to food insecurity is low crop yields. Low crop yields are also caused by lack of inputs and high cost of inputs. Those are inputs that are commonly used like chemical fertilizers and herbicides to control weeds, insecticides and fungicides, among others. All those inputs could be manufactured locally. For example, let us take the issue of fertilizer, which is the subject matter in this Motion. Fertilizers are important. Organic fertilizers are imported. They cost us a lot of money. The foreign exchange that we spend in the importation of those fertilizers could be saved if only we manufactured them locally. They are expensive and they are not imported on time. They are not available when farmers need them. Even when they are imported, the amount that is imported is not sufficient. The fertilizer is not available at the places that it is needed; that is in the rural areas. It is not available at the right time. I believe that there are locally available materials that can be used to manufacture inorganic fertilizers. We have phosphate which is available locally. If you go to a factory like the Molasses Complex in Kisumu, the by-products of sugar-cane can be used to manufacture urea. That could lower the cost of producing fertilizers for our use. That is because of the availability of the required raw materials that could be used to manufacture the chemicals that the farmers dearly need. If we established factories to manufacture fertilizers, we would lower the cost of food production. We will lower the price of fertilizers if we manufacture them locally instead of importing them. The price of importing inorganic fertilizers is very high. If we established factories to manufacture them locally, we would create employment for our youth. That is because importation is a market for the importers. It creates employment for a few people who import fertilizer at a very high cost. So, creating local factories would create employment, save on foreign exchange and, at the same time, make inputs - in this case the fertilizers - cheaply available. Farmers would not have a problem getting them as it is the case now, when we are importing. By the time the farmers need them during the planting season, the fertilizers are not available. They are yet to be imported. We also have inorganic materials that could be processed into less bulky soil components. We have the by-products of coffee, sugar and tea industry. All those organic materials could be processed into fertilizer. That way, we will make the work of the farmer easier because we will be having organically produced materials for use as fertilizer. Today, the by-product of the sugar industry called “mark” is used as fertilizer the way it is. It is so bulky. It takes so long to disintegrate and change the soil. So, if we could come up with a factory to process it into less bulky material that amends the soil conditions much faster, it would be to the advantage of farmers. So, we have all these opportunities. We have organic and inorganic materials, which could be used to manufacture fertilizers locally and make agricultural production much better and reduce food insecurity in this country. With those few remarks, I beg to support and congratulate the Mover."
}