A year or two ago, I had breakfast with Sameer Merali, son of the billionaire Naushad Merali, sadly deceased. I was pleasantly surprised. While the younger Merali is quite unassuming, he is one smart cookie.
And the humility barely masked a courtly ease in the management of human beings, being a fellow who has been brought up around power and great wealth.
I listened very carefully to the things he told me about business, naturally, and particularly agriculture. The family owns Sasini, which is big in tea, coffee, avocado and macadamia.
While the encounter was not a reporting session and I’m, therefore, not at liberty to talk about what we talked about, he spoke matter-of-factly about big things in the agricultural value chain.
I was keen to hear his views about Haas Avocado and the fact that his company was ramping up production all over the place.
From our encounter, I went away with the firm belief that agriculture, unless you are micro-scale, is not a production challenge (with access to capital and technology, production can always be sorted out); it is market problem. If you have the market, given time you can grow anything.
So how much effort and money is invested in market development by the government? The Horticultural Crops Directorate (HCD) has temporarily banned the export of Hass, Pinkerton, Fuerte and Jumbo avocado varieties by sea starting November 3, 2023.
Export by air is still open, including of fruit from neighbouring countries. I suppose this is designed to lock out immature fruit, which messes the quality of Kenyan fruit and which some small-scale growers can’t resist picking.
I don’t know who went to Scandinavia and they reported how proud they were to see Kenyan fruit in the supermarket but, on buying it, it tasted like Lucifer’s tonsils: Horrible. The fruit from South America was heavenly.
If you have ever tried to sell food, you will have realised that the one thing clients want, it’s stability of supply. Yes, you have a tonne of fruit, but can you supply every Monday? It is only after you have established consistency of supply that a keen inspection of your quality follows.
If the government reaches for the nuclear button every time some dizzy farmer harvests fruit that is not fully ready, how can the small suppliers establish a steady supply?
That reminds me of government advertising during the days of Joe Mucheru as Information Cabinet Secretary. If Taifa Leo—in which that government thing called GAA was never inserted—carried a saucy headline, the government would withdraw advertising to all the Nation Media Group’s products, no matter how meek their coverage. It is the kind of indiscriminate, collective and disproportionate punishment rooted in colonial-era unfairness.
Avocado production rose from 66 million tonnes in 2018 to 86 million tonnes in 2021, according to government data.
The value of avocado exports was put at $15.15 billion in 2022. Kenya is Africa’s top exporter of avocado and among the top 15 in the world. Nearly every farmer in this country has at least a few avocado trees. I do hope they like guacamole.
A ban on raw macadamia export has been in place on and off since 2009. While harvest of immature nuts is a problem here as well, the major reason for the export ban is to support local processing and the benefits it accords.
I have seen some numbers online suggesting that a kilo of processed macadamia is Sh3,600 while for the raw nut a kilo ranges between Sh20 and Sh200. Currently, there are 20 licensed processors, handling 80,000 tonnes of nuts. Some 6,000 farmers grow this crop and there is big money in it.
I know farmers who last year waited for the folks who buy the nuts to show up and they didn’t. In other words, quite apart from earning nonsense money for their nuts, there were no buyers at the time.
Kenya is, or was, a serious player, the fourth-largest producer after Australia, South Africa and China. I suspect in those countries the nut is grown by large-scale farmers with the capacity to process and add value to the produce. Traceability is not an issue, immature products are non-existent and so are export bans. How do Kenyan farmers compete?
I have spent a year’s sabbatical doing some farming, something this country does quite well and a low-hanging fruit in our search for hard currency. My conclusion is that we are not serious in regulating the growing and sale of some of our products, always falling back on the cheap way out: Taking products from the market.
Production is not just about fertiliser, for crying out loud. The market is awash with crap seed you are not always sure you are getting what is on the packet. Fake fertiliser is also a major risk. I have not seen an extension officer since childhood. And I do not want to get into issues of cost.
Rather than waste the little tax money we have in hairbrained import scams, how about getting serious for once?
