Why the tragic collapse of rural economies

Over the past fortnight, a local newspaper has been running a rather depressing series of photo essays on ‘Ghost Towns’ of Kenya.

These are towns in rural Kenya that once thrived but have since fallen on evil days. And the reason in each case is that a cash crop on which this local prosperity had been built – sugarcane, cotton, coffee, pyrethrum, etc – had ceased to be a viable source of rural incomes for a variety of reasons, and classic agrarian destitution had set in.

The shuttered shops, bars and other small businesses shown in this series of articles, are merely the tip of the iceberg. The greater truth is that within the hinterland once served by these shopping centres, you will find desperate small-scale farmers who have now been reduced to beggary.

Of particular interest is that this trend reveals the sheer futility of Kenya’s tribal obsession with the presidency – the holy grail of Kenyan politics.

Some of these so-called ghost towns are in regions that have already celebrated having “one of their own” serving as president. And the locals are just as poor as those who have yet to enjoy this supposed privilege.

This phenomenon of formerly booming commercial centres reduced to empty shells is not uniquely Kenyan.

There are photo essays online of America’s “abandoned shopping malls” in what some refer to as a “retail apocalypse”. There are dozens of such abandoned malls to be found in the US, including shopping malls which in their heyday were much grander than anything we have seen in Kenya.

The collapse of some American retail stores is of course not as tragic as the ghost towns of Kenya.

Few – if any – Americans are as poor as Kenyan small-scale farmers. And where in Kenya ‘ghost towns’ reveal the economic collapse of entire communities, in the US the retail apocalypse merely reflects shifting patterns in consumer spending.

For us in Kenya, it all boils down to destructive policies in the agriculture sector, usually influenced by what we like to call “corruption cartels”.

These deliberately engineered policy failures are what lay the foundation for grand corruption.

For whether you speak of rice, or sugar, or wheat or maize, the fact is that these commodities can be obtained on the global spot markets for much less than what our farmers must sell them for if they are to make a profit.

That is not to say that these commodities are inherently cheaper to produce elsewhere. But rather that rich countries usually offer very generous subsidies to their farmers. This creates a huge gap between the import prices of these crops (very low) and the local selling price (very high).

And when you are dealing with a captive national market of about 50 million people, most of whom consume at least one of these products every single day, the potential profits are vast indeed.

Profits which should rightly have supported the families of millions of hardworking farmers will instead end up in the bank accounts of a few dozen importers.

In these circumstances, the billionaire commodity importers find that it is very much in their interests that small-scale farming should fail. Indeed, there is big money in this country, dedicated to ensuring that small-scale farming continues to fail so that massive imports of various food commodities can be justified.

And there are many instruments readily at hand for guaranteeing this failure.

First, there is the artificial raising of the cost of fertilisers and other inputs. There is also the deliberate suppressing of production by the distribution of fake “certified seeds” in the planting season. And then there is the organised and unrelenting resistance to genetically modified (GMO) crops, which in some cases would triple productivity on these small-scale farms.

Consider this example:

Judging from diaspora remittances, there really are very many Kenyans living in the US.

These Kenyans living in America are people who eat corn products made from GMO corn all the time and suffer no ill effects.

And yet only now, at the end of a 10-year process, does Kenya seem likely to legalise GMO cotton seeds as a preliminary experiment in the growing of non-edible GMO crops.

GMO maize remains banned.