Growing up in the tea fields of Kirinyaga prepared me to appreciate part of who an average smallholder tea farmer is.
Most farmers in the neighbourhood had only an acre under tea. Others averaged two to three acres. This started my initial appreciation of the circumstances that define a smallholder tea farmer.
Tying up some nylon material around the waist and legs, at times to the chest, to go out picking tea very early in the morning in the biting cold full of dew was the next.
Spending long hours at the tea buying centres waiting for KTDA trucks to pick the leaves was the other.
The interim payments for tea being used for paying school fees were the easy part. When the bonus payment finally came, the entire landscape changed. You could smell the power of cash in the air. Folks who previously just ate maize and beans could now afford some beef stew. Others would get big assets like a car.
It was around the 1950s when smallholder farmers started growing tea. There are many stories on how it started. The whites were opposed to Africans getting into cash crop farming, while some Africans despised it as an extension of colonialism. Others wanted to get into earning some decent cash.
The plantations mostly in the Rift Valley and parts of Limuru were basically controlled by Whites and the early African kingpins. The rest of the major tea-growing areas were and remain smallholder tea farms.
The smallholder subsector has never been without challenges, both systematic and historical. On April 30, 2021, vide Gazette Notice No 4020, the government appointed a Task Force on Design, Development, and Implementation of the Tea Industry Price Stabilisation Framework, largely to help solve some of these smallholder tea farmer challenges and the tea industry at large.
The smallholder tea sub-sector has experienced significant growth since its inception in both total planted area and production, which is projected to grow at 6.6 per cent annually to hit 328 million kilogrammes by 2025 among smallholder farmers.
It is therefore of utmost interest on how the smallholder tea subsector is performing, especially in individual earning terms.
The average daily earnings of these ultra-small farmers are a huge concern as they can barely sustain them. The task force report revealed that most smallholder tea farmers are on ultra-small tea farms. Eighty-three of smallholder farmers under KTDA plant tea on an acre or below while 75 per cent are on half an acre and below.
The ultra-small farmers with only a quarter an acre account for 44 per cent of all smallholders. The Kenya Tea Industry Performance Highlights for 2023, by the Tea Board of Kenya, reports a total annual national production of 570,260,178 kilogrammes, where 278,512,230 kilogrammes was from smallholder farmers, at 49 per cent.
According to the task force report, the gross margin analysis showed that the average daily earning for smallholder farmers is Sh188 per acre (Sh282 per acre in the East and Sh95 per acre in the West) which translates to daily incomes of Sh45 from a quarter acre; Sh111 from half an acre and Sh181 from an acre.
This means that slightly over half a million smallholder tea farmers in Kenya must complement their tea incomes with alternative economic engagements to surpass the United Nations $2 (Sh260) daily subsistence requirements threshold.
The low tea incomes coupled with low diversification of income sources among smallholder tea farmers is a critical factor influencing their vulnerability to declining tea prices.
This is the plight of the average smallholder tea farmer requiring urgent intervention. Most importantly, the cost of running their business needs an urgent review, while exploring all possibilities of improving the price discovery mechanism. All ways to build possible efficiencies must be embraced. Advanced technology in cost-cutting and marketing tea is the only way out.
Clearly, my early knowledge of smallholder farmers is still inadequate.
