Improve agriculture to stimulate growth

Improve agriculture to stimulate growth. FILE PHOTO | NMG 

By JENNY LUESBY
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Summary

• Labour-intensive manufacturing, to be straight, the one kind that has been a ladder for many of the world’s poorest nations, has traditionally meant textiles, with banks of people sitting at tiny tables sewing in button holes, or adding collars or zips to the world’s clothing.
• We are not in an ideal position to be a big clothing manufacturer, as we don’t yet have much of our own oil to make synthetic fabrics, such as nylon and the like, nor much cotton or general fabric production.

I don’t count as in the vanguard on this, but, last week, I finally took the time to read the BBI Report, and found, quite unexpectedly, that I was very bothered by its formula for prosperity. For, the report covers ten areas with 402 recommendations, but the most fall under prosperity, at 82.

This focus on prosperity is all good and well: times only seem to get financially harder in our nation. And the struggle to make ends meet isn’t bringing out the best in many people. The harder things get, the more resentment festers and fights break out. Tensions are surely running high.

But the shocker for me in reading this latest formula for greater net happiness was how fixed, dated and stuck the recipe for creating Kenyan wealth was. The emphasis was on innovation as the route to a wealthier nation, founded in industrialization.

Indeed, it read like an A level student had swept in and said ‘hey guys, there’s more value addition in manufacturing, let’s go there’ and been capped only by student 2, who said, ‘but, you know, innovation is good too’. So that’s got the prosperity answer sorted. Out came the future, under shared prosperity, as: we need labour-intensive manufacturing to give us enough jobs.

Labour-intensive manufacturing, to be straight, the one kind that has been a ladder for many of the world’s poorest nations, has traditionally meant textiles, with banks of people sitting at tiny tables sewing in button holes, or adding collars or zips to the world’s clothing.

We are not in an ideal position to be a big clothing manufacturer, as we don’t yet have much of our own oil to make synthetic fabrics, such as nylon and the like, nor much cotton or general fabric production.

But my issue with the ‘manufacturing is the answer’ approach of the report, is not any case against manufacturing, as such. Value addition is definitely the way to pull up Kenyan wealth, and labour-intensive manufacturing is the most viable way to begin, as it doesn’t require big pots of capital investment and it does create jobs, which we need.

Moreover, as the BBI report gets to solution number 5, it moves harder into agriculture as the base for all this industrialization, which seems spot on. It asks that the government aggressively seek new markets, and that early-stage food and product processing be encouraged in every village.

Indeed, from solutions 25 to 30, we even turn to farming, with one mention of the need to raise productivity: and there lies my issue. For as the BBI Report spins off and around that point with calls for low taxes, and low debt, and many other things, the fleeting mentions of agriculture are too fleeting.

Bailouts, it suggests, should encourage farmers to move into other, more profitable crops. I wouldn’t disagree. But in our nation where the FAO has reported that the single greatest handicap on our agricultural productivity is farm management skills – and that’s the biggest handicap of a long list of handicaps, in fact – and our agricultural extension, research and farmer support has substantially broken down, the inattention to resolving our underlying problem of poor productivity is lame, to say the least.

For any student of industrialsation will know that before industry moves agriculture. Again and again, globally, it is an agrarian revolution that has preceded and fueled an industrial revolution. Trying to race into industry from a stagnant agricultural base has never yet been achieved.

Ethiopia is going like a rocket beside us, based on agricultural growth first. Rwanda, likewise. The FAO says we in Kenya have the conditions and potential to be the bread basket of much of Africa – making the food that everyone needs.

Yet here we have our biggest report for years in terms of vision, and the imperative, and potential, and requirements of ‘food first’ are simply absent.

So all that value addition is supposedly to be built on the basis of our very low yields, and that isn’t hopeful at all. For high yields will make for a lot more processing jobs, if only we could bury our aversion to farming as, truly, our economic saviour.