Wilfred Mailu has lived around mango trees all his life. His parents had a few trees scattered around the home as he grew up, and he liked the smell of ripe mangoes.
“I don’t think there is a fruit in this world that captures my heart the way mangoes have,” he says, a hint of excitement dancing in his ageing eyes. “Is there anything sweeter than a mango, really? That obsession with the fruit is the reason I am a mango farmer today.”
Mailu lives in Makueni County and is now one of the thousands of mango farmers whose efforts have made Makueni County the biggest mango producer in Kenya.
But it wasn’t until five years ago that he started making good money from mango farming. Officials from the county government visited his village, Kawala, and encouraged horticulture farmers in the area to combine their efforts to have greater bargaining power in the market. That is how the Kawala Smallholder Horticultural Farmers’ Group was born.
“Before 2013 we incurred huge losses in our farms. Each tree on my farm yields about 200 mangoes per season, but more than half of it went bad in the field due to lack of access to a good market. It was bad. They paid us between one shilling and three shillings per mango,” Mailu says.
“Post-harvest losses were the single biggest challenge that the farmers here faced. In many cases, a farmer would lose up to 120 mangoes on each tree,” says Sammy Ndivo, an extension service provider with the county government. “That was the first thing we had to work on when agriculture was devolved. We needed to figure out how to stop those loses.”
Mailu is now the chairman of his cooperative. In the five years that the group has existed, he has seen his earnings from mangoes grow twenty times.
“Now I sell each mango at a minimum of 23 shillings. Since we are now aggregating our produce and have a cold storage facility, we can negotiate for better prices for our mangoes,” he says. “I would be lying if I said that devolution hasn’t helped me as a farmer in this county. It is because of devolution that we have a good market for our mangoes and that we are finally making good money out of mango farming.”
Mango and dairy farmers in Makueni have been the greatest beneficiaries of devolution. In 2018, the county built and opened a fruit processing plant, one of the first tangible multi-million shilling developments of the devolved units. The plant was built with the proceeds of a Ksh125million grant from the European Union. The county says it pays farmers 15 shillings per mango delivered for processing, much better than the three shillings many of them previously earned at the farm gate. This processing plant now provided a ready market for the 12,000 mango farmers in the county.
“Devolution is the best thing to ever happen to Makueni. If agriculture had not been devolved, a lot of the things you see in this county today wouldn’t exist, says Lawrence Nzunga, the County Executive Committee Member ( CECM) of Agriculture in Makueni County. “We wouldn’t have our farmers organized into groups and we would definitely not have the industries that we have built, such as the mango processing plant or the Kathonzweni Dairy.”
However, while mango and dairy farmers in Makueni sing praises for the county government, vegetable farmers are not as happy. According to them, while devolution has empowered the average farmer to produce more and at better economies of scale, the county government hasn’t put as much effort in linking vegetable farmers to a market, as it has for fruit and dairy farmers. One such disgruntled farmer is Pius Ngila.
The county says it pays farmers 15 shillings per mango delivered for processing, much better than the three shillings many of them previously earned at the farm gate.
“Here in Makuyu where I live, we are all vegetable farmers. Our market is very local so we never get money from outside this area. My neighbor is my customer. What that means is that we often incur losses in terms of lower prices, because we are all growing the same thing at the same time, targeting the exact same market. What the county should have done for us to find us a market outside Makuyu, perhaps even an export market. This would create us more wealth and motivate us to scale up production,” he says.
“Ngila’s farm is a beautifully tended five-acre piece of land, in Makuyu, Kaiti Constituency, on which he tries out different crops, using both irrigated and rain-fed agriculture. Given the slope of the land, he has built terraces to stop soil erosion. For many of the farmers in this county, pulling off a successful cropping season is quite a difficult task, given the little rainfall that the area receives. In many occasions, the farmers have to contend with 250mm of rain a year, or none at all. This has in turn kept the county permanently listed among those in perennial drought and in need of food assistance.
“We acknowledge we are yet to reach or change the life of every farmer in the county, but we are working on it. In the few years that we have existed, we have grown the sector tremendously,” says CECM Nzunga. “At the time of devolution, we only had nine dairy cooperatives in Makueni. But today we have grown them to 21 and by the end of September, all these cooperatives will have joined together to form one union, so that they can sell their products as one entity. That’s growth.”
But the county is expressing optimism that in the next three years, it will have broken free from shackles of food insecurity, as it introduces its farmers to modern farming methods that are resilient to climatic changes. One such method is conservation agriculture, which Caroline Masimbi, a primary school teacher, has been trying out for the last three years. She grows maize on her two-acre piece of family land.
“I remember how much of a fight it was to get my husband to let me try out conservation agriculture. The land had been unproductive for so long and the rains barely came, so he had given up on farming. But when I finally convinced him to do conservation agriculture and we tried it out, we saw tremendous change,” she says, a glint of joy in her eyes.
“For the three years that we have practiced conservation agriculture, we haven’t tilled the land at all and the yields have grown from the two bags we harvested previously, to 24 bags now. I even have surplus maize to sell.”
“We acknowledge we are yet to reach or change the life of every farmer in the county, but we are working on it. In the few years that we have existed, we have grown the sector tremendously,” says CECM Nzunga. “At the time of devolution, we only had nine dairy cooperatives in Makueni. But today we have grown them to 21 and by the end of September, all these cooperatives will have joined together to form one union, so that they can sell their products as one entity. That’s growth.”
“I remember how much of a fight it was to get my husband to let me try out conservation agriculture. The land had been unproductive for so long and the rains barely came, so he had given up on farming.”
In Busia County, I hear the same upbeat remarks from county executives. “For Busia County, agriculture has significantly grown and improved people’s livelihoods. Nearly 80% of our people derive their livelihood from agriculture. Our food poverty level has gone down from 60% at the time of devolution to below 40% today,” says Dr Osia Mwanje, CECM of agriculture. “This means that most households now have the capacity to have all the three meals per day. We have also been able to increase the acreage under various crops by at least 30%.”
“One of the greatest challenges we are facing as devolved units is that farmers, and everyone else, expect us to solve all the problems within the sector with the snap of a finger. Come on, that’s expecting too much,” says Dr. Osia. “Yes, we should have done a lot more by now, but this unrealistic demand placed on us is putting pressure on counties to deliver.”
“I think it would be wrong to say that agriculture has grown because of devolution. That is not necessarily true,” argues Mathews Wanjala, county executive in charge of agriculture in neighbouring Bungoma. “Yes, the sector has grown, but remember there are very many players in the industry, including non-governmental organisations, institutions of higher learning, research organisations and development partners. So devolution can’t take exclusive credit.”
For Makueni, for instance, the conservation agriculture project is spearheaded by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, with funding from the European Union. Through that project, more 1,000 acres of land in the county has been brought under conservation agriculture, and several tractors made available for farmers. Smallholder farmers – especially those on very small pieces of land, in the region of less than half an acre – have been trained on how to use jab planters, the goal being to disturb the soil as little as possible.
But while some counties celebrate themselves for growing agriculture under devolution, other farmers feel that agriculture performed better under the national government. According to them, extension services are crucial in agriculture, but since 2013, those services seem to have fizzled out.
“One of the greatest challenges we are facing as devolved units is that farmers, and everyone else, expect us to solve all the problems within the sector with the snap of a finger. Come on, that’s expecting too much.”
“Agriculture should not have been devolved,” laments Charles Muriuki, a coffee farmer in Ndaro-ini, Nyeri County. “The idea behind devolution was to bring the government – services, really – closer. But ask any of the farmers around here if they have ever seen any extension officer coming to visit them. The national government did a better job.”
“Farmers need to understand that devolution did not come without challenges,” Dr Osia in Busia says. “The single biggest challenge that counties face is the cost of implementing the devolved structures. For agriculture, most things were devolved, including crop husbandry, animal husbandry, livestock production, veterinary services and fisheries. The cost of implementing agriculture has not well been outlined. How much do you require to implement all the agricultural devolved functions? We don’t really know.”
“When we used to have the centralized system on government, the national government would send money directly to sub-regional offices to support agriculture directly. But now money comes as part of the sharable revenue and increasingly, we are seeing some counties getting less and less allocations,” adds Mr Wanjala of Bungoma County. “These allocations do not even conform with the Malabo Declaration where African heads of state committed to set aside 10% of the national budget to agriculture. It is up to the counties to decide what their priorities are. In Bungoma last year we got about 7% for agriculture, this year we got 8%. It is higher than last year’s allocation but is still lower than the 10% required by the Malabo Declaration.
It is instructive to note that the Ministry of Agriculture – at Kilimo House in Nairobi, the one under the national government – was allocated Ksh53 billion in this year’s budget, yet nearly 100% of the agricultural functions are devolved to the counties.
So why is the national government still allocating a lot of money to the ministry? “As counties, we feel that devolution is being sabotaged by the government itself by the low funding. We can’t even start new agricultural programmes due to the low funding,” said Mr. Wanjala.
“Agriculture should not have been devolved,” laments Charles Muriuki, a coffee farmer in Ndaro-ini, Nyeri County. “The idea behind devolution was to bring the government – services, really – closer. But ask any of the farmers around here if they have ever seen any extension officer coming to visit them.
“For us to be able to effectively implement all the devolved functions as is required of us, we must first put in place some policies and regulations because we cannot operationalize the devolved functions without the attendant policies and laws put in place, particularly by the county governments,” argues Dr Osia, Busia’s agriculture minister. “These bills are currently on the floor of the county assembly.”
But as the counties complain of stifled funds and lack of attendant laws, farmers say they would like to see counties address the issue of multiple cess (a tax) on produce, which is charged when agricultural goods cross county borders. The farmers say the multiple charges pushes up the cost of production, in turn impacting on the overall cost of food. In 2018, for instance, the national government had to intervene and mediate between the county government of Mombasa and tea farmers, over a Ksh32 per packet of tea cess that Mombasa County had imposed. Eventually, Mombasa agreed to drop the demand.
Counties have acknowledged the implications of the multiple cess on produce, but say there is little they can do about it because with the low funding from the national government. The counties are under immense pressure to grow their own source revenue, and cess is one way through which they do that.
Written and published with the support of the Route to Food Initiative (RTFI) (www.routetofood.org). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.
