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{
    "id": 924827,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/924827/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 113,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Tigania West, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Mutunga",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13495,
        "legal_name": "John Kanyuithia Mutunga",
        "slug": "john-kanyuithia-mutunga"
    },
    "content": "produce for the world market, we make mistakes. We have made enough mistakes as a country. The first mistake we made is in maintaining small-scale production all through. Other countries in Asia have consolidated their land. They have created production zones. They know where to produce rice in large quantities, and mangoes and bananas in large amounts. If you ask any technocrat in this country how many metric tonnes of bananas we produce, he or she will not be able to tell you. We may not be able to invest in processing so that we sell these commodities. That is one of the things we need to do. We need to reorganise our agriculture so that the Big Four Agenda can be achieved. This country is endowed with a lot of potential. We have almost all the agro-ecological zones that can be found anywhere. There are some countries where half of the year they are cold and icy and the other half they are warm and hot. These countries are able to manage their climate and production systems so as to deliver to the world market as they feed their people. Sixty years down the line, as a country, we are not able to feed our people. We have a very small population of 48 million that we are not able to feed. We should be ashamed. One of the reasons is that we let go of our potential. We let our coffee go. Our coffee quota in the world market was lost. We lost our beef and pyrethrum quotas. We are now relying on flowers. We are being overtaken by Ethiopia as we watch because there are many things we need to do but we are not doing them. We need to manage our economy in such a way that we focus on selling our commodities to the world market. We need to teach our farmers to produce to sell in the world market. We need farmers who are competitive producers, not those who produce for their survival. In this country, there are people who are trying to survive through producing both carbohydrates and proteins. You find people keeping chicken, goats and poultry, and growing all the crops on a very small piece of land. That is not a farmer. That is somebody who is practising magic. We need to categorise our farmers very carefully and register them. We will then know that in Zone A there are dairy producers who only produce milk. We then locate our technocrats to those areas so that they can support them. We may not be able to sell at the world market if we are not competitive. Competitiveness has to do with cost reduction. Cost reduction is based on the size of production. If the size of production is big, the cost will be high. If the cost is high, we cannot sell anything anywhere. We can only leave these people to feed themselves. More often than not, we find ourselves importing products that we could produce. Let us look at the oilseed industry. Through policy measures, we have deliberately killed our oilseed industry. The farmers who could survive on oilseed industry thrive on nothing else. They try something different. We can produce simsim seed oil, sunflower oil and all oilseeds in this country but as a policy decision, we import and spend more than US$47 billion importing oilseed into this country instead of our farmers benefitting from this kind of money. We should focus on supporting our smallholder farmers. People say that it is expensive but we have the best technocrats. We have a system with all the scientists in this country who can come up with varieties and genetic material that is cheaper for Kenya to produce even in arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) areas. We are not focusing a lot on this. We have left our farmer to survive on his own. Our idea is that the farmer will survive anyway, and that is very wrong. Agriculture is not a priority in this country. Looking at the 2017/2018 Budget, agriculture was 11th in terms of funding. When I talk about agriculture, I do not want to talk about infrastructure as they try to relate it and say it somehow contributes to the agriculture sector. Africa took a decision in 2003. Our then President signed the Maputo Protocol, which presupposed that by 2008 - five years down the line - African countries would have supported The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}