Plans are underway to train and offer legal counsel to Smallholder coffee farmers in the country to understand the contractual and marketing dynamics to secure better deals during the sale of their produce.
Kenya Coffee Producers Association (KCPA) chairman Peter Gikonyo expressed fears that the small holder farmers have been disadvantaged as they were excluded in the coffee value chain explaining that according to a survey they conducted only 11.5% of growers confirmed comprehensively reading and understanding of the milling and marketing contracts.
Speaking in Nairobi on Thursday during the launch of the Enhancing Smallholder Coffee Farmers Inclusion in the Coffee Value Chain project report, Gikonyo said that they are working towards addressing the gaps identified by the report in efforts geared towards empowering farmers to take charge of their business.
“It is when the farmer is empowered that they are able to negotiate, engage and sign contracts which they understand and can be enforced,” explained Gikonyo.
The chairman explained that due to the exclusion of the farmer and lack of information, there are instances when the farmers have signed contracts with clauses that allow manipulation or cost addition which the farmer is not aware of and they will only see in their sales statement.
Gikonyo said that the report which is a result of interaction with farmers and industry stakeholders will be a game changer and even with the current market prices coffee farmers will be able to get a fair share of earnings from their produce.
According to the report, in the year 2020/2021 coffee contributed 0.15% to the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (AFA, 2021) and about 20% of the total agricultural export earnings. The sub-sector supports over 5 million people or 10.5% of the Kenyan population directly and indirectly as per the 2019 national census.
Smallholder coffee growers remain the biggest producers producing between 60 -70% of the total coffee production in Kenya through cooperatives system of production and processing. It is estimated that smallholder coffee growers are 800,000, comprising 99.6% of the total coffee growers in Kenya.
KCPA Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sarah Nyagah said that through the support of IDH (The Sustainable Trade Initiative), they were able conduct a baseline study which unearthed a number of areas where the farmers are excluded and they can now address the challenges using evidence.
Nyagah explained that from the study they found out that farmers lack legal support when they are contracting the service providers for the milling and marketing of their coffee and they are now able to educate them on what needs to be done before engaging the service providers.
According to the CEO, they discovered a sad state of affairs where famers deliver their coffee for milling and leave without getting a report on the quality of their coffee which poses a risk since they can be later told their coffee was of lesser quality thus getting paid less money.
“Coffee is bought by its cup quality and if farmers does not get their pre-milling report, it opens a loophole for exploitation,” explained Nyagah adding that they have addressed the challenge by training the farmers to always get a pre-milling report so that they can ask any questions if there are differences between what they presented for milling and what they are getting after milling.
She highlighted that another challenge they encountered is that the majority of farmers do not have dollar accounts and coffee is traded in dollars as per the legal provisions and the marketing agents convert the payments by their own rates which are not necessarily declared to the farmers thus disadvantaging the farmer and worsening the exclusion.
Nyagah called on duty bearers to take charge in empowering the farmer by providing knowledge and information and enforcement of legal provisions that support the farmer inclusion.
By Joseph Ng’ang’a
