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{
    "id": 786397,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/786397/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 278,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Ndwiga",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 278,
        "legal_name": "Peter Njeru Ndwiga",
        "slug": "peter-ndwiga"
    },
    "content": "Madam Temporary Speaker, I would be happy if I had more time to talk on this hot subject. I believe that if tea farmers hear that I was here today supporting them--- This is because what is happening in the tea sector now is bullish. Those of us who grow tea – and I want to confess that I am a tea grower – can tell you that the pain that goes into growing tea, up to the moment where you get peanuts, is so great that not many people will enjoy that cup of tea. In fact, not many people who enjoy a cup of tea know what effort we put in to produce tea. It is very sad that in many tea growing areas, there is abject poverty. The areas used to be examples of prosperity in this country. Today, if you visit most of these tea growing areas you will be surprised that poverty has visited those places. It is extremely sad. That is why this Motion is important. It is time this House looked seriously at the real cause of the problems of the tea sector. Madam Temporary Speaker, previous Parliaments have been looking at the issue of tea. I know that Agriculture Committees, especially the one that I was involved in travelled everywhere with the aim of improving the sector. Even today, so many years later, we still have the same subject on our table. I believe that this time round, we will get to the bottom of the problem of this sector. Listening to my colleagues who have contributed earlier, it is true that there are myriad problems which affect the tea sector. I want us to be careful. There are those areas where we have Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA). Let us look at the small scale holders and KTDA. There are also those other places where we have the big companies that produce and process tea. The problems are different. In areas where we have big companies, the issue is land and what they do with it. In KTDA-managed factories, the myriad of problems are what they are doing with the tea. We have said time and again that we do not want to visit London and the first thing you see in a supermarket is English breakfast tea. There is not one bush of tea in the whole of Britain, but that is what you find. Why is it that today we cannot get into value addition? I agree with Sen. (Prof.) Ongeri. Why is it that we are throwing away our produce and giving other people to go and add value out there and our farmers end up with peanuts? These are some of the things that we are going to interrogate seriously this time round so that by the time we are through, our farmers will get what they should be getting. Madam Temporary Speaker, for those of us who know tea farmers, a woman wakes up in the morning sometimes with their children to go to pick tea. By the time they have delivered the tea, sometimes it is evening and the children cannot concentrate the following day in school. In most of these places, the education standards have also gone down drastically as a result of the standards in this sector not being properly organized. We want to relook at the entire process of tea from production and the way we process tea in our factories up to marketing. We want to seriously interrogate the marketing the tea. 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."
}