Business Daily (Nairobi)
Zeddy Sambu
16 June 2008
The Government has reduced the amount of grains it will import to forestall an acute supply shortage in the last quarter of the year.
Only one million bags of cereals and pulses will be shipped in duty free, amounting to two million bags less than earlier planned, said Agriculture permanent secretary Romano Kiome.
The imports were meant to prevent a looming food crisis expected to start in mid August.
Dr Kiome said yesterday a decision had been made to let the World Food Programme import the balance if and when need arises.
Good prospects
"The latest statistics show that agricultural prospects are good in the traditional farming areas of the North Rift. Rains have failed in parts of Eastern but other parts of the country are doing well," the PS said.
An outbreak of drought in the last quarter of 2007 and post election turmoil early this year are estimated to have destroyed a sizable fraction of the 38 million bags of maize - Kenya's staple food - harvested last year. Post-election violence alone is estimated to have destroyed 2.3 million bags of maize making imports necessary.
In his budget speech to Parliament on Thursday, Finance minister Amos Kimunya set aside three billion shillings to finance food imports and an additional two billion shillings to subsidise agricultural inputs.
WFP and the UN's food agency and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) are among the donors who have signed up to help Kenya meet the shortfall.
Participants at a FAO-organised Africa meeting on food security questioned the commitment of governments to food security on the continent, citing underfunding of agriculture.
Vigorous plan
"Africa needs a vigorous plan to boost the supply system, especially those that serve small scale farmers - who are the victims of the soaring prices," FAO said.
Experts say only scaling up of agricultural investment to ensure growth would guarantee the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals relating to hunger and poverty reduction.
Yesterday, five Kenya Government ministries questioned the criteria of budget allocations to the country's top revenue earners, giving the example of agricultural sector which gets about 6.5 per cent of the total annual public expenditure while accounting for nearly 25 per cent of the revenue.
Agriculture minister William Ruto, said his ministry was seeking dialogue with budget technocrats to discuss "consistent underfunding of the key sectors." "We plan to cost all our priority programmes this year and seek audience with Treasury to present our case," the minister said.
Agriculture, Co-operatives, Fisheries and Livestock and Water ministries criticise this year's budget proposals, saying it had underfunded them despite accounting for 45 per cent of all annual revenue.
This year's budget, they said, was crafted contrary to past agreements by African governments to increase their financing of agriculture to more than 10 per cent of their total spending.
The last of these agreements was reached last year in Bamako. Kenya would need to spend more than Sh76 billion on agriculture to comply with this agreement.
According to Mr Ruto, a long term solution to the country's food insecurity problems lies in higher investment in agriculture.
Measures are also needed to ensure that farm inputs are affordable to most farmers, he said.
"The Government is also exploring ways of increasing production through irrigation in the arid and semi arid areas.
Kenya's agriculture is predominantly rain-fed and concentrated within 20 per cent of the country's land area that received medium to high rainfall.
Irrigation accounts for only 1.7 per cent of the total land area under agriculture. These areas account for 1.3 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product and 18 per cent of the total output.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Business Daily. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
