Farmers in Kenya's Central Province have formed groups to fight a price war with middle men and buyers following a deep plunge in macadamia prices.The growers claim middlemen are taking advantage of their poverty to rip-off from their sweat. They also claimed competition between buyers and middlemen put pressure on farmers to harvest premature nuts which resulted in a drop in quality.
"The companies do not wait for the nuts to mature, but come and offer very low prices because they know that the poor farmers need the money," said Andrew Gichuki, the coordinator of a recently formed macadamia marketing and processing group in Nyeri South District. The group brings together more than 300 macadamia farmers in the district, who are seeking to improve the quality of their products, and the prices they can earn for them. The area has traditionally been a coffee-growing region, but farmers have been looking at other options since coffee prices began plummeting several years ago. But now macadamia prices have followed suit. An all time high of Sh85 ($1.25) per kilogramme in 2005 came with a rush of players into the sector looking to profit.
Prematurely picked macadamia nuts are often deformed or wrinkled, spongy, or discoloured. They sink in water, have low oil and high sugar content which make the kernels dark when roasted. These are usually discarded during processing.
"When the quality dropped, the nut buying companies blamed it on the farmers and dropped the prices," said Gichuki. Prices have now dipped to as low as Sh20 (30 cents) a kilogramme. To compound matters, the buyers "selected all the good nuts and left us with poor quality nuts that we still have in our stores," said Gichuki.
Now the farmers want to use their newly found unity to bargain for better prices from buyers. "We produce a lot of macadamia and if we were to boycott selling it to brokers at low prices they would listen to us," said Gichuki.
A report from the Ministry of Agriculture shows that the area produced about 420 tonnes of macadamia nuts in 2006, though farmers say they have been producing more. Now they are pushing for a processing factory, rather than selling the nuts to foreign processors. The group believes this could increase their earnings by 165 per cent, through processing, packing and selling in local shops and markets. The nuts are usually roasted, salted then packed in small sachets of 25 grams each.
But quality challenges remain. The farmers have called on the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to address poor-quality seedlings and develop a variety that can thrive in Central Kenya.
Business Daily
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