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{
"id": 2261,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2261/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Monda",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 83,
"legal_name": "Robert Onsare Monda",
"slug": "robert-monda"
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"content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir. I rise to support this Motion. I come from a coffee and tea-growing region which is Kisii. The Kisii farms have become too small because most farmers have a farm holding of half an acre or one acre. The tea crop is grown on average below an acre. The factories are constructed on loans that have finally become a responsibility of the farmers to repay and yet these are large loans. The farmers take a long time to repay these loans. I rise because I know the circumstances under which several factories in the Kisii region and other parts of this country have been constructed. The cost of farm inputs for both coffee and tea has also become very high. It is a big problem for the farmers to pay for the farm inputs and at the same time pay for the loans that were used for the construction of the tea factories. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, on coffee, we know that the Kenya Planters Co-operative Union (KPCU) was even put under receivership because of such loans. This is the case and yet this is a co-operative for small-scale farmers. Overall, I want to emphasize that coffee farmers have lost their crop because of the loans that they have to repay. On tea, I want to indicate that when farmers repay these loans, it takes away all their earnings from their production. You send your produce to the factories and at the end of the day, you only work to repay these loans. That is why I support this Motion and request the Government to take over those loans to offload the burden from tea farmers. They should ease the burden on Kenya Planters Co-operative Union (KPCU) and coffee farmers so that farmers and their families can benefit from the farm produce."
},
{
"id": 2262,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2262/?format=api",
"text_counter": 294,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Monda",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 83,
"legal_name": "Robert Onsare Monda",
"slug": "robert-monda"
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"content": "With those few remarks, I support."
},
{
"id": 2263,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2263/?format=api",
"text_counter": 295,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, thank you for giving me the opportunity to also contribute in support of this Motion by Dr. Khalwale. Like Ms. Mbarire, I also grew up in a tea growing area. My father was a tea farmer. Thanks to that, that is how he was able to pay for my secondary school education."
},
{
"id": 2264,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2264/?format=api",
"text_counter": 296,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, it is important that we appreciate the difficulties that our farmers find themselves in are also political; if you go back to the politics of interference in our coffee and tea industries."
},
{
"id": 2265,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2265/?format=api",
"text_counter": 297,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Imanyara",
"speaker_title": "The Temporary Deputy Speaker",
"speaker": {
"id": 22,
"legal_name": "Gitobu Imanyara",
"slug": "gitobu-imanyara"
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"content": " Order, Dr. Mwiria! Maybe, I should remind, hon. Members, that the Motion we are debating is not the one on the Order Paper. It was amended to read tea and coffee. So, wherever you see the word “tea”, you should read as “tea and coffee”."
},
{
"id": 2266,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2266/?format=api",
"text_counter": 298,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, following on that, I would like to say that the problems that the tea farmers have experienced were the same problems that were experienced by coffee farmers in this country, especially because of the political interference in the management of farmer’s organizations and the industry in general. Therefore, it would be unfair to punish farmers for problems that they are not responsible for. The situation of tea farmers, like that of coffee farmers, especially the small-scale farmer, has deteriorated with time. Firstly, because the families have become larger and yet, the land that is available is basically the same size as it was 20 years ago. That is because land in cash crop growing areas is extremely expensive and subsistence farmers are not able to expand. So, even in terms of saying that you would grow bigger and use economies of scale to have higher productivity, is not possible. Secondly, the tea and coffee growing areas are generally areas that experience very cold weather. That comes with other demands, especially with regard to health. Many of the farmers have to spend their limited resources to support health systems and, sometimes, walk long distances to dispensaries. But, essentially, those conditions are not so amenable to farmers that do not earn that much income. Therefore, the little that is generated again goes to other needs."
},
{
"id": 2267,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2267/?format=api",
"text_counter": 299,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
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"content": "It is also a case that the cost of food in tea and coffee growing areas is much higher. They cannot grow subsistence food, except for potatoes and a few horticultural foodstuffs. When you consider the main staple food in Kenya like beans and maize, those farmers have to go out to the market because they cannot grow that. So, they find that their limited resources are also being expended to buy foodstuff that they have consume at home because tea is not a food crop."
},
{
"id": 2268,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2268/?format=api",
"text_counter": 300,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Mwiria",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology",
"speaker": {
"id": 190,
"legal_name": "Valerian Kilemi Mwiria",
"slug": "kilemi-mwiria"
},
"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would also like to point out the fact that, unlike in the old days, when young men and young women were ready to support their parents with labour to tend the coffee and tea farms, these days, they are becoming less interested. So, you will find that the parents who are getting older have to continue working on those farms. If they cannot do it, then they have to higher labour which is much more expensive. Again, they have to spend their resources in so many different other ways. As we support the farmers by waiving the loans - and we hope that will done very soon - it is important to have additional complementary support to farmers which should include support in education through bursaries. If possible, we should encourage factories to build schools and other facilities that are easily accessible to farmers. In terms of electricity, through the Constituencies Development Fund (CDF) and Rural Electrification Programme (REP), we can ensure that all tea and coffee buying centres have access to electricity. Of particular importance is the road network. It is very surprising that if you reach tea and coffee growing areas like Githongo in your constituency or Michimikuru in Nyambene, Tigania, the road network is very poor. We are grateful that we are now seeing some improvement in the road network. So, it is important that, as we support them in other ways, we ensure that infrastructure, especially the road networks, are improved so that farmers can access factories more easily and that the cost of transporting tea and coffee is reduced. That way, those benefits are transferred to the farmer. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, it is also necessary to support Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) through training, support in marketing and in any other way. The Government can subsidize many of its services to ensure that many of those costs are not transferred to farmers. I also hope that we can get more from the multinationals that are the biggest beneficiaries of the tea and coffee industries. I do not think we are getting enough in return. We are now seeing Safaricom, Equity Bank and others coming up with bursary and scholarship programmes for students. I do not think I have seen multinational companies having strong bursary programmes to support young people in schools in the tea growing areas, especially children of the farmers and workers in those places. I would also like to urge that even the management organizations and the farmers themselves need to be improved to be more efficient in management and be more transparent. They should ensure that farmers do not lose money that they have spent so much time earning the hard way being stolen by unscrupulous managers of those authorities. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I would like to conclude by saying the following: I hope what has happened to other coffee factories in terms of complement by the Government to support farmers and traders will also be extended to our tea and coffee farmers. With those few remarks, I support."
},
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"id": 2269,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2269/?format=api",
"text_counter": 301,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Keter",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 169,
"legal_name": "Charles Cheruiyot Keter",
"slug": "charles-keter"
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, thank you for giving me this chance to contribute to this Motion. I want to thank my colleague, Dr. Khalwale, for thinking it wise to have such a Motion at such a time. I want to say that before I joined politics, I was a director of a small-scale tea factory. I became a chairman of a new factory where I resigned immediately I was elected a Member of Parliament for Belgut in 2003. Therefore, with my experience in the tea sector and also being a small-scale farmer, I want to say that this Motion has good intentions. The Kenya Government has been saying that tea is a big foreign exchange earner in this country. But when you see how the small-scale farmers live, it is pathetic. They live in a pathetic situation. Therefore, the Government should take over the loans because KTDA is owned by small- scale tea farmers. They have about 54 factories across the country. All those factories get their loans at commercial rates. There is no involvement of the Government at all. Therefore, when we call upon the Government to write off the loans owed by small-scale tea factories, it is good. It will assist small-scale farmers so that they are also happy. KTDA announced a lot of money in terms of bonus but what goes down to the farmers is peanuts. We have multinationals which are buying tea. M/s Lynton, which is owned by Unilever, is a leading tea buying company. These are well-connected companies. Therefore, the Government should look into ways of assisting the small-scale factories to establish marketing capacity at the source. If tea is packaged at source, the multinational companies that come to buy it will buy it at the source and meet the transportation costs. Right now, all the factories transport the tea to the tea auction in Mombasa at their own cost. Therefore, if the Government can assist and ensure that we have tea auctions in the respective tea producing regions, selling tea will really be of help. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, my second point is on sub-division of land. Previously, people used to own between 50 acres and 100 acres of tea crop but right now, with the increase in population, you cannot even have an acre of tea crop. Therefore, if you own an acre of the tea crop and you are supposed to service a loan, with the costs related to equipment having increased tenfold compared to the cost of the same in the 1960s and the 1970s, when all these tea factories were started, production becomes untenable. Therefore, establishing new factories to meet the high demand for tea will really assist, if the Government takes over all the loans. There is another area where the Government has tried but it can do better. The major cost item in all our tea factories is electricity. If electricity is subsidised, small- scale farmers will rejoice. I say so because in my constituency, I have multinational companies producing tea. I have Finlay and Unilever, both of which produce their own electricity. Therefore, as a small-scale tea producer, you cannot compete with multinationals. Unilever generates about two megawatts of power. Therefore, their production costs are low, and they also own the marketing agents, namely M/s Lynton. Therefore, if the Government assists in establishing mini-hydropower stations that can produce between 1 megawatt and 3 megawatts, the cost of electricity, which is the main component of expenditure in the small-scale tea factories, will really be zero. Therefore, I call upon the Government to speed up this initiative. I know that the Government has started doing this in some areas. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I know that there is an ongoing mini-hydro power project, and the initiative should be expanded to other areas, so that we can have many mini-hydro power stations. The river that feeds Sondu Miriu Hydro Power project passes through my constituency. The water goes there and generates about 60 megawatts. We can put up mini-hydro power stations midstream, with a capacity to produce between 10 megawatts and 15 megawatts, all the way down to the Sondu Miriu Hydro Power Station. Those stations will assist small-scale farmers. With those remarks, I beg to support the Motion."
},
{
"id": 2270,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/2270/?format=api",
"text_counter": 302,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Dr. Kones",
"speaker_title": "",
"speaker": {
"id": 53,
"legal_name": "Julius Kipyegon Kones",
"slug": "julius-kones"
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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I also rise to support this Motion. I can see my friend, Mrs. Odhiambo-Mabona, smiling. I do not know whether she also grows tea. I want to congratulate my colleague, Dr. Khalwale, for bringing this Motion to the House. The Motion is timely. As the various speakers have said, tea remains the major foreign exchange earner for this country. Therefore, I would expect the Government to put in more resources into this sector because it is the backbone of our economy. My worry is on the way the Government seems to deal with tea issues. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this morning, I asked a Question relating to the Tea (Amendment) Bill that we passed in this House, and I was not impressed by the way the Assistant Minister responded to that Question, because he looked so casual. He did not appear like someone who felt for the ordinary tea farmers, who are, really, the backbone of the economy of this country. The Assistant Minister should be aware that tea is now the leading foreign exchange earner. The leading foreign exchange earner for this country is no longer tourism or horticulture. It is tea, yet we do not seem to do anything to promote tea farmers, so that they can produce more tea. The challenges facing tea farmers are many. If you come to my constituency, you will see that between 65 per cent and 70 per cent of the area is under tea production. I have been unable to explain why the poverty rate remains very high in that area despite the fact that tea earns this country the biggest amount in foreign exchange. It beats all mathematical formulae that we cannot correlate the high poverty rate to the high foreign exchange earnings realised by this country through tea. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, let me suggest that apart from the Government writing off all debts owed by farmers in the various tea factories, the Government also needs to go further and support other activities that affect the cost of production of tea. In my constituency, and in my neighbouring constituency of Bomet, there is overproduction of tea. That area requires two or three new factories to cope with the production of tea there. We want to urge the Government to come in and put up tea factories. The Government should give funds to the KTDA to start up additional factories in those areas as a matter of urgency, because there is tea. We are producing tea but there is nowhere to process that tea. The Government needs money. Why does the Government not put money in those areas to facilitate processing of more tea and earn more foreign exchange for this country? Another area I would like the Government to come into is to support the farmers in terms of transportation. One way of doing this would be to support the co-operative societies that farmers own by purchasing for them trucks for transportation of tea from their areas. Most of our farmers cannot afford to buy new trucks. The KTDA seems to have failed to manage its transportation system. I think it is the role of the Government to come in and support farmers to purchase trucks for transporting tea from the farms to the factories. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, as regards fertilizers, the Government needs to find a way of working with the KTDA to ensure that farmers get fertilizer at competitive prices. Another problem we have in our area, on which I can speak with a lot of authority and with all the facts, is that there has been collusion between officials of the KTDA and some unscrupulous traders to falsify data on fertilizer supply to farmers. I have a very classic case of a farmer who owns a quarter of an acre of tea crop. He had taken three bags of fertilizer but in the payslip that he was given during the tea bonus payment, it was indicated that he had 64 bags of fertilizers. Therefore, on the Kshs120,000 bonus that he was supposed to earn, he needed to add another Kshs60,000, just because of the error and mismanagement in fertilizer distribution. This is an area I really want the Government to come into. Over the time, the Government has been hiding behind a statement that the KTDA is a private company; and that it is in the interest of the Ministry to look after the interests of the farmers. The Ministry is the overall prefect. Could the Government come in and find a way of streamlining the supply and distribution of fertilizer to ensure that farmers get inputs at the right prices, and that farmers are not charged for fertilizers they have not taken from the KTDA? Another point is on electricity and my colleague, Mr. Keter, mentioned it here. We really need to support our small-scale factories to generate power. In most of the areas where tea is grown, there are rivers which have the capacity to generate power. In my constituency, we have the capacity to generate enough power to run our factories and even have excess power to sell. Unfortunately, there has been lack of vision and proper planning not only by the KTDA, but also by the Government. The mistake is that some people with vested interests either within the Government or KTDA are using the same projects for power generation to start their own power projects from which farmers are completely removed. What we have done in my constituency is to mobilize the farmers to register themselves and then start projects. I am glad that UNIDO came in to assist the farmers, and they have started a power project. I believe it will be the first hydro-power generation run and managed by the locals in my constituency. It will be the first and the only one in the country. I would like to invite the Minister to make a tour in my constituency and we will show him how to do it. He could then replicate it elsewhere. This will reduce the cost of power in the factories. I would like the Ministry to take this seriously. Most of our factories use firewood as a source of power. There is not enough land to plant trees. However, we have designated forest areas which you can allocate to the tea factories to plant trees---"
}
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}