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{
    "id": 942341,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/942341/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 169,
    "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": "enhance productivity and incomes of the farmers and rural population; to improve investment on climate and efficiency of agri-business development, agricultural crops and exports that will augment the foreign exchange earnings of the country. This is done through promotion of the production, processing, marketing and distribution of crops in arable areas of this country. This is covered in Section 8 on promotion of scheduled crops. There is also Section 14 which is on freedom to register, especially sub-section (e), and Section 15 which has to do with the registration of growers’ association, especially Section 15(c) and Section 5(d). Finally, there is registration of dealers which is Section 16. Any agricultural transformation agenda demands that the actors are known and organised. This is the very elaborate agricultural cooperative movement. I may wish to cite the coffee and tea cooperatives, which were very laudable co-operatives in this country. It was not done easily. It involved identification, listing and registration of people, especially the farmers who were involved in those cooperatives and who performed their duties where their products were finally being marketed by the cooperatives. The extent to which farmers are known and registered determines the strength of the resultant entity. The supplies’ management of tea, save for the hiccups we have in the tea industry today, is a laudable effort and a success story quoted all over the world. Organisations are about individuals. It is about the database of farmers. It is also the form and the context it takes. The Societies Act Cap 108 presupposes that entities can register as societies for ease of doing business, especially when their operational volumes and contributions are small. The societies are held together and sustained through knowledge and preservation of the right to associate as provided for in the Constitution under the Bill of Rights. Farmers’ registration is the basis of all forms of organisation in the agricultural sector since the individuals form entities and the entities from conglomerates. The Kenyan agricultural sector needs to transform. Efforts that have been put in the direction of transformation of the agricultural sector have not yielded a lot of effort. However, a lot of resources have already been used. The impact of those resources cannot be clearly seen though quite enormous. It is because there has been minimal effort in organising farmers. The focus on organising farmers has been little. If we invested a fraction of those resources, first of all to organise the famers, the resources used in infrastructure development and personnel development of the sector would have yielded a lot of benefits. Kenya would be a quoted African economy that has been moved through agricultural transformation. The missing link is, therefore, a proper and deliberate farmer organisation. A close scrutiny of the Kenyan agricultural reform agenda conceived under three strategies that I may wish to quote reveals much. One, the strategy for revitalising agriculture which was launched in 2004 covering up to 2014, presupposes that the poor performance of agriculture then would be looked into. It laid a lot of emphasis on the vision and the objective that ought to be pursued in order to reduce losses and come up with sustainable development. The agricultural sector development strategy 2010/2020 centred around investment in order to yield accelerated growth and poverty reduction. The strategy that is now in operation is the agricultural sector transformation and growth strategy which covers 2014 to 2029. It focuses a lot on agricultural growth and transformation from subsistence to agri-business. None of those strategies, save for the latest one, engaged farmers effectively. Farmers will be central pillars in the implementation of this strategy. The agricultural sector growth and transformation strategy presupposes piloting and clustering of farmers in thousands and employing targeted interventions. It also identifies the need for a large scale production approach, but it shies away from confronting the real problem 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."
}