Entry Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "id": 978945,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/978945/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 151,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Kigumo, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. (Ms.) Wangari Mwaniki",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13369,
        "legal_name": "Ruth W Mwaniki",
        "slug": "ruth-w-mwaniki"
    },
    "content": "Hon. Speaker, in my view, ensuring that the farmer gets a little bit more, by allocating Ksh24 billion to transaction costs out of a sale of Ksh69 billion is extremely high. There are high labour and energy costs in the operations of the tea processing factories. Many of my colleagues have talked about automation of the factories. I believe that the Tea Board of Kenya will look into that. Over the years, the tea industry has continued to use old technology whose cost eats into the farmers’ earnings. It is a pity because, while two-thirds of my constituency consists of tea growing farmers, they get much less than the tea pickers after input costs are deducted. So, there is an urgent need to come up with a tea board that will come and address all those issues and regulate the various players in the sector to ensure that the focus is more on the farmer. Debates around big industries such as tea and sugar mainly focus on the businesspeople and the middlemen. Many a times, we fail to focus on production. The Tea Bill was mainly to provide for the introduction of a tea board like it used to happen before. I believe the CS will promulgate rules that will operationalise the Bill. I hope our Committee will help Members like me who come from the tea growing areas to be aware when the rules are in operation. We believe that such rules will look into production issues. That is because, at times, it is very hard to regulate prices of an input like fertiliser. Farmers need affordable farm inputs and credit. A lot of transaction costs and abuse of processes happen in the stage of procuring those inputs. We hope that the Tea Board will then play a proper coordination role on how the procurement of inputs like fertiliser is done."
}