Connoisseurs have long appreciated the merits of Kenyan coffee, typically described as having a fruity, acidic flavour. For many years, this renown helped make coffee one of the country’s prime exports.
It was the top earner of foreign exchange for Kenya from 1963, when independence was gained from Britain, until 1988. According to the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK), the country produced 128Â 926 tons of coffee during the 1987/1988 season, which netted a profit of almost $74-million.
That was then.
By last year, output declined to about 55Â 000 — something attributed to rising production costs, mismanagement within cooperative ventures and poor policies on the part of the government.
In particular, farmers point a finger at the long chain of middlemen in the sector: they say they face long delays in getting paid as their beans change hands en route to supermarket shelves.
“It has become so expensive to grow the crop; most of the time there is no money to even buy fertilisers or other accessories needed for production of quality coffee,” says Wambui Kinuthia, a coffee farmer on the outskirts of Nairobi. “Even when we harvest the crop and sell it to dealers, they take ages to pay us.”
The industry has also been plagued by prices that are, in the words of the International Coffee Organisation, at “historically low levels”. Although the coffee price has strengthened in the past two months (to an average of almost $1,20 per kilogram in January), the general decline in profitability has led to a rapid increase of poverty in areas where coffee is grown in Kenya.
These problems, which are also experienced by producers elsewhere on the continent, came under discussion recently at the first African Fine Coffee Conference, held in Nairobi from February 19 to 22.
The meeting was organised by the Eastern African Fine Coffees Association, and it brought together representatives of the coffee industry in Africa — and further afield.
Delegates debated the possibility of improving coffee prices by reintroducing a national quota system that would restrict supplies of the commodity. The system that was in place previously collapsed in July 1987.
They also recommended eliminating the detested middlemen by enabling farmers to market their produce directly, and taking steps to ease the debt burden accumulated by coffee producers who could no longer make their crops pay.
“Farmer institutions owe financiers such as the World Bank, European Union and other financial institutions huge sums of money, which have arisen because they cannot realise enough money from their crops due to bad market prices,” said Akuma.
The debt of Kenya’s coffee industry is put at $156-million.
Certain delegates suggested that the governments of coffee-producing countries should intervene to help debtors renegotiate credit terms with the multilateral donors.
“Such a process should be implemented hand-in-hand with measures to guard [the] quality of coffee in order to increase consumption,” said Nestor Onsorio, CEO of the International Coffee Organisation. — IPS