Small-scale tea farmers in Bomet county have accused the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) of deducting their earnings to fund construction of a factory, which is till a pipe dream,10 years later.
The farmers, who supply their green leaf to Kapkoros Tea Factory, claimed that KTDA had deducted Sh5 per kilogramme of produce in 2012.
“The money was meant to fund construction of the proposed Kamogoso Tea Factory in Bomet Central Sub-county, but it is yet to kick off even after 15 acres was bought for that purpose,” said one of the farmers, Mr Vincent Kipngeno Kosgei.
The growers wondered how Motigo Tea Factory, an off-shoot of the Kapkoros plant, was built and operations launched in 2018 despite the fact that deductions for its construction was effected in 2013, a year later than deductions for the stalled factory.
“The Sh270 million that was collected is said to have been placed in a fixed deposit account in a local bank, but we do not know how much interest it had earned or if the money is safe at all,” said Mr Kosgei.
Some farmers are said to have paid as much as Sh300,000 to finance the project.
“We are appealing to Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Peter Munya to look into this matter in the spirit of reforms in the tea industry so that construction of the factory can resume,” said the farmers in a statement read by Mr Kosgei.
Mr Munya has been driving reforms in the tea industry over the past one year, in what has seen the election of new directors to head the factories.
Construction of additional factories in the region has been driven by oversupply of green leaf to three factories in the region—Kapkoros, Tirgaga, Olenguruene and Motigo—that are managed by KTDA.
Kapkoros Tea Factory, which is the mother of the other plants, receives an average of 180,000 kilogrammes of green leaf a day against a capacity of 96,000 kilogrammes.
Over the past few months, surplus green leaf has been re-directed for processing at Litein, Chelal, Kapset Boito and Tebesonik factories in Kericho county.
Bomet Central and Bomet East sub-counties have an average of 43,000 small-scale tea growers supplying their produce to factories in the region that is well-endowed agriculturally.
Though KTDA manages the factory units, construction cost is passed on to farmers, with an average of Sh500 million to Sh750 million used for that purpose.
The South Rift region is one of the largest producers of tea in the country and also has the highest concentration of multinational tea companies.
