The story is all too familiar. A crop promises rich returns, farmers jump onto the bandwagon but it stalls, subjecting them to losses.
On September 5, the first consignment of frozen avocado from Kenya was cleared for export to China.
Packed in clear 500 gram bags, the frozen avocado chunks carried the hopes of thousands of farmers who have switched to farming the crop and are eager for rich returns. With increased interest in avocado, one may be forgiven for thinking that indeed this is the new frontier in Kenyan agriculture.
But is avocado the next big thing? Experts are warning that there is need to approach this issue with caution even as more farmers from Central and Rift make the shift from crops such as maize, coffee and tea to avocado.
Rich returns
The story is all too familiar: a crop promises rich returns, farmers jump onto the bandwagon but it stalls, subjecting them to losses. Best examples of products that hit the market with a bang only to disappoint are Pepino Melon, Purple Tea, Shia Seeds, Quail among others.
But even with that sober reality, for three years, the Government has been on a sustained drive to encourage farmers to diversify to crops such as avocado due to its lucrative global market.
The Ministry of Agriculture projects that the current market prices should fetch farmers at least Sh5,000 per tree per season if well tendered.
Collectively, county governments have issued out hundreds of thousands of avocado seedlings to farmers. Reflectively, in 2018-19 financial year, Kenya exported avocados worth Sh10 billion, or about 80,000 tonnes, double the amount exported in 2016. Economic Survey 2019 statistics show the value of horticultural exports increased by 9.6 per cent to Sh124.3 billion and accounted for 22.9 per cent of total domestic exports in 2018.
“The growth was mainly driven by increase in exports of cut flowers and avocados, which more than doubled in 2018,” notes the survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.
Geoffrey Rimbere, a Director at Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya (FPEAK) an association of growers, exporters and service providers in the horticulture industry, describes avocado as the green gold.
“Whether you grow Fuerte or Hass, the bottom line is they are all avocado. As it is, Kenyan avocados cannot meet the demand in France leave alone Belgium or London and Germany. Kenya needs to grow more avocados then our economy can grow,” Mwenda told Smart Harvest.
There are also opportunities in value addition.
“Avocado oil is as important and as sought after as olive oil and you can sustain yourself by just exporting avocado oil,” he added.
Despite the positive views, skepticism that avocado farming could be just another agricultural fab or a bubble that will burst, persists among some farmers. It is also captured in the reluctance of some leaders to see the traditional earners such as coffee and maize make way for avocado.
Chorus of protest
Key among those encouraging the avocado revolution is Deputy President William Ruto who told maize farmers in North Rift that diversifying to crops such as avocado will solve the problem of low maize prices. But his proposal was met with a chorus of protest among some key players, farmers included.
The DP was criticised by farmers and leaders who feel the government is encouraging avocado farming in North Rift to cover its failures in promoting maize.
Interestingly, in February, Uasin Gishu Governor Jackson Mandago announced that an investor had shown interest in setting up a Sh200 million avocado processing plant in the county.
In Nyeri County, Senator Ephraim Maina believes that shifting from coffee farming to avocado is not a guarantee of success. The senator would rather the government did more to revive coffee farming and discourage the slump in tea farming.
“If you desert from what you know because of failure, you will not succeed anywhere else. You can’t abandon coffee, tea, maize and sugarcane in the name of avocado,” the Senator has consistently maintained.
There is a fear that with the ever growing number of farmers taking up avocado farming, there will be a supply glut followed by drastic plummeting of the prices. Further than that, although Kenya is already an importer to European countries the new Chinese market has come with stringent conditions that farmers had to abide before their produce was accepted.
Among the conditions of the April trade deal signed between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing was that the avocado should be frozen and packaged.
The horticultural export market has tough conditions imposed on exporters such as Kenya and the results of failing to meet those conditions can be painful to countries.
For instance, it wasn’t until 1997 when the United States Department of Agriculture lifted an 83-year-old ban on Mexican avocados imposed to prevent the spread of weevils that the country was able to export its avocados.
Too risky?
With the Chinese expressing a similar wary over the spread of fruit flies, Kenya faces the risk of being locked out of the expansive Asian market. Some of the conditions imposed include the farmers peeling and freezing the peeled fruits to negative 30 degrees Celsius and chill further to negative 18 degrees while on transit to the destination. Luke Kinoti, an avocado farmer in Meru County is confident that Kenya can sustain the export market but pegs the growth of avocado farming on the local market.
“We cannot exhaust that opportunity to export to China but local consumption is what will make it profitable,” he says. “For export, if we are able to meet the standards, I know some of my friends who are in full time export of avocado and they are doing very well. It has given me the motivation to increase my acreage under avocado because I know that there is a future,” Kinoti says. Like Kinoti, Peter Muchemi, a farmer from Nyeri County, says local consumption had grown tremendously.
“I have seen the increase in avocado consumption. When I was going up avocados were not common in the family but now I see a lot of people are consuming them,” he says.
angige@standardmedia.co.ke
