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"content": "others must also be appointed by the governor. The hon. Senator has also suggested that the County Executive Committee Member should also appoint. This should not be the case because at the national level, it used to be the case but at this level, in order to make it stronger, I suggest that we allow the governor, in consultation with other elected leaders of that county, to work on this list. It should include the Senator, Member of National Assembly, leader of majority and minority who should sit down and decide on this. The people of that particular county are affected across the board irrespective of whether one is rich or not. When it comes to food, everyone must eat. Some people take one meal a day, others three but it is still food. We should guarantee that these people are appointed but the governor must be involved. Regarding the last one, which the hon. Senator proposes to be one man and one woman appointed by the county governor to represent such special interest within the county; I suggest that we amend this because we are dealing with agriculture. These persons should be serious farmers whether large scale or small scale but a model for the others. This will give them an opportunity to advise others farmers from a practical point of view. The committee will come up with policies which will inform the county governor and guarantee food security in the county. Furthermore, today, agriculture is not the agriculture we used to know many years ago. I came from Kitale yesterday, where I am also a farmer. There is shortage of fertilizer. Most of the fertilizer subsidized by the Government is found in the NCPB. If the boards at the counties, indicated as the County Cereals and Produce Board Committees were in place, the struggle that the people of Trans-Nzoia are going through would not be there. They queue with farmers from western Kenya, West Pokot County and so on. In my county of West Pokot, we have a cereals board silo which serves a large area. When only 3,000 bags of fertilizer are availed and there is a farmer who requires 1,000 bags, how would you distribute to the rest? If we had already devolved this function, this would be easy. The county government would have already mapped to know the amount of fertilizer consumed and take it to the sub-county units so that farmers can buy it from that level. However, today there is a mess, where even unscrupulous business people pretend to be farmers. They collude with the central unit, the NCPB. They buy the fertilizer at Kshs1,800 per bag, which is the Government price, at the gate of the NCPB, they sell it at Kshs2,500 but because the clouds are hanging ready to rain, one has no choice. However, if the county cereals committees were in place, this would not be happening. The policy level of how we can make things better is found in the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) stationed in a county like it is in some counties. I have seen that the Senator who generated this Bill has listed major cereal producing counties namely: Trans Nzoia, Narok, Nakuru, Elgeyo-Marakwet, Bomet, Murang’a, Nyeri, Meru and Laikipia. The Government is starting an irrigation project of one million acres in Galana. Therefore, we should target all the counties. There are special ways of carrying out irrigation including the drip irrigation which requires less amount of water. Counties like Turkana, Marsabit and Mandera should be practicing that kind of irrigation. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}