Business
Kenyan Farmers Ditch Coffee For Bananas as a Cash Crop
In Kenya, coffee, described as the country’s “black gold” during a 1980s growing boom, has over the past few decades lost its shine for growers as the cooperatives that market and sell coffee overseas have lowered the prices they’re willing to pay for it. “Coffee was, and is still, a golden crop not shaken by the tough climatic conditions (in Kenya),” said Joseph Muhe, who stopped farming coffee six years ago and now pays school fees for his five children with money from growing bananas and macadamia nuts. “But brokers have siphoned the value in coffee,” he said.
The commercialization of bananas in the Mt. Kenya region has attracted researchers from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), which develops improved “tissue-cultured” seedlings for farmers and provides training on how to maintain them.
Grown to combine traits such as high productivity, fast growth and resilience to tough climactic conditions, the seedlings are making it easier for many more smallholder farmers, particularly in Central Kenya, to move from growing small patches of bananas for home use towards structured commercial farming of the crop.
Banana farming is becoming so popular that the government has launched the National Banana Development Strategy, to oversee growth of the industry until 2016. “It has always been a crop for women’s financial security,” said Munene, the banana farmer from Ndieni village. “But with the efforts to commercialize it through groups and support from partners, we can see men voluntarily joining us because of the sweet banana money.”
Source: Thompson Reuters Foundation
