A farmer sorts out dry sugarcane at a farm in Yiro Village, Siaya County. Cane farmers must now wake up and face the truth. They have become slaves to a crop that does not make economic sense. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Dear smallholder sugar farmers, I have bad news for you: You will never make money out of the crop. And to our dear consumers, you will still be at the mercy of unpitying sugar nabobs of our times as long as this country relies on smallholder farmers for its cane supply. For as long as we grow sugarcane on smallholder plots, and as long as cartels control the import business, chances of taking “poisonous” sugar will still be high.
Once upon a time, sugar was a product of slavery — today we have slaves of sugar who work and toil with no pay. It no longer matters how much of taxpayers’ money is paid to farmers within the Mumias or Chemelil sugar belts to ostensibly offset debts. For as long as we have indebted smallholder sugar growers, there will never be enough cane and we shall never mechanise like other countries. Our sugar will still be expensive to produce on those small plots and to meet the shortfall, the cartels will continue to thrive. The cartels — and those who make capital out of this warped system — want that status quo maintained for that is how they make money.
THANKLESS CROP
The last time I met Prof Peter Anyang Nyong’o and had a quasi-academic discussion on the historical problem of sugar industry in Kenya, he agreed that smallholder plots do not work for sugarcane. It is an issue that he had written about since 1970s and he was a strong advocate of sugar blocks. How we condemned thousands of families in western Kenya sugar belts into smallholder sugar slavery is the story of our times. How to free them from this thankless cash crop is the challenge we face as a nation.
When the first sugar plantations were started on the tiny island of Barbados in the 17th century, it had been acknowledged then that the only way to make sugar cheaper was to grow the cane in plantations under a complex system of farm and factory. The British settlers, the likes of sugar mogul George Ashby, had realised that since the Caribbean had no precious metals — which had made Spanish colonies thrive — they could make money by cultivating sugar. But since they had no labour to work the plantations, they asked London to help and it swamped the island with African slaves who formed more than 85 per cent of the population.
SUGAR BARONS
The success of plantations in Barbados changed sugar from a rare elite commodity to become the world’s third most valuable crop after cereals and rice. Sugar triggered wars, political manipulation, piracy, plunder and led to the establishment of plantocracy — a high-society of sugar barons led by Col James Drax. It replaced honey as a sweetener and generated huge profits for Britain and its New World colonies.
Back in Africa, it promoted the rise of slave trade as shiploads of workers were taken to the Caribbean to work in sugar, cotton, rice, and coffee plantations — a business that reached its peak in the 18th century.
In Kenya, memories of this trade is the Kengeleni monument in Mombasa (someone decided to steal the bell!) and the Kitale club, which is built on a former slave market site, previously known as Quitale.
It was this success with plantations that was brought nearer home in 1924 when Australian sugar magnate, George Russell Mayers, who had in 1919 settled in Kinangop established Victoria Nyanza Sugar Company near Miwani. Although he was forced to move towards the edge of Nandi escarpment due to Malaria, he laid the foundation of the modern day sugar industry — but not the way it was envisaged.
COMMUNAL LABOUR
Meyers’ 14,000-acre farm is what is today known as Miwani Sugar —which is all but dead due to a combination of factors that work against the farmers and the crop.
In the early days, when labour was cheap, the sugar belt thrived and six factories had by 1928 been set up in Kibos, Miwani, Muhoroni, Kahawa Sukari in Nairobi, Ramisi and Mumias. The reason labour was cheap was because in 1919, Governor Edward Northey had issued labour circular asking the administrators and chiefs to “encourage labour” through lawful means. It was this circular that led to forced labour policy and saw juveniles and women forced to work in the plantations. In 1920, the colonial government had also introduced compulsory paid communal labour for 60 days, in the African reserves for those who had not been in wage labour for the preceding three months in a year.
That is how Kenya’s sugar industry was built in the early years with cheap slave-like labour.
With the British settlers unwilling to settle in the malaria belt of Nyanza, the plantations were left in the hands of Indian farmers who made a kill out of it. But there was a problem since the Indian farmers were restricted as to where they could buy land, the number of acres they could purchase, and the period of their land leases. But they managed to get in excess of 100 acres and delivered their cane to Meyers’ factory. They also opened new land in Miwani, Kibos and Chemelil.
4,200 WORKERS
In Uganda, a new 800-acre sugar plantation had been started by a 26-year-old Muljibhai Prabhudas Madhvani in Kakira and it became the largest source of colonial labour in the country as it expanded. Another plantation had been started by another 20-something Nanjibhai Kalidas Mehta who had abandoned cotton for sugarcane, turning himself into Uganda’s first industrialist.
All this success, as in the Caribbean, was as a result of cheap labour of cane cutters and weeders coupled with plantation farming. Back in Kenya, and for 20 years, the Meyer’s family had shown everyone in East Africa the importance of plantations but dogged by ill-health, he left for South Africa where he died in 1930, aged 64. His empire would later be sold to Madvani’s cousin Devji Hindocha who had shareholding in Madhvani’s Kakira Sugar company. It was Hindocha who would rename Victoria Nyanza Sugar Company Miwani Sugar in 1946. By then, it was producing 20,000 tonnes of sugar from its 15,000 acres. It also employed 4,200 people making it one of the biggest in the region.
The company had 14,000 acres of cane in Miwani (9,300 acres), Chemelil (4,252 acres) and Kibigori (543 acres). At the Kenyan coast, the Madhvani family had opened a plantation in Kwale where they established a factory at Ramisi, turning Kenya into one of the most successful producers of sugar for local consumption and export.
But shortly after independence, the government decided to build a sugar industry based on smallholder farms and it started enticing farmers to take up a new cash crop, promising support, capital and hoping that they would synchronise their planting and sell their cane to factories owned by the government.
ARCHIVAL RECORDS
The first experiment at Chemelil was mooted in 1964/65 when the Hindocha family was approached to sell their 5,000-acre Chemelil Estate to form the nucleus for the new government-run factory. In return, they were to get 5,500 acres elsewhere.
Managed by Booker-Tate, Chemelil turned to be a disaster and the first farmers found that their cane had matured before the factory was built. There were no roads from the cane farms to the factory. The government had also bought shares in the privately-owned Miwani and the Mehta Group-managed Muhoroni. Each factory had been given a radius of 25 kilometres from which it would get its cane and to ensure that all of them operated at full capacity. But they didn’t. Unlike before, when there was a single management of the plantations, each smallholder was his own boss.
We now know from archival records that experts warned the ministry of Agriculture that this model of cane production would not work. “... It is not sufficient to merely produce the total quantity of cane required annually. It has to be grown, harvested and delivered with almost split second timing so that exactly the right amount of cane goes on arriving at the mill round the clock, day after day and week after week,” warned Commonwealth Development Corporation sugar farming consultant B.C.J. Warnes in a declassified letter dated August 5, 1971.
COLLECTIVE FORTUNES
While other sugarcane growing countries retained the colonial-era sugar plantations, Kenya went for the more politically-correct, more expensive, smallholder schemes as bureaucrats struggled to settle the landless and allow the peasant farmers to grow new cash crops.
Mr Warnes was one of the tens of consultants who had arrived in Nairobi to advise the government on the future of the experiment with smallholder cane farming — which had not succeeded anywhere in a sugar scheme. His worry was that it would be impossible to maintain the military-style discipline that was required in sugarcane farming and that the government would have little say on how an outgrower tended his crop.
“The outgrower is an individual. He can’t be hired and fired even if it were politically acceptable to do so, which it is not. And yet the collective fortunes of the entire body of outgrowers, and the milling company itself, depend absolutely on the willingness and ability of each and every grower,” he wrote in a letter to senior officials at the ministry.
But no one was willing to tell the farmers the truth that they had been given a cash crop whose profitability depended on plantation model, cheap labour and huge government support. None of these was available.
TAKING ADVANTAGE
Managing these outgrowers became a nightmare and Mumias, so far the largest miller in Kenya, had at one time about 66,000 registered farmers. Even with these numbers, it was only doing 20 per cent of its capacity as cane shortage, debts, pilferage and corruption brought out the reality: Smallholder schemes would not work. In 1988, Miwani finally closed doors. In the same year, Madhvani family also closed down the Ramisi Sugar in Kwale as both struggled with imports of cheap sugar into the country. By that time, both factories were producing only five per cent of Kenya’s sugar.
What went wrong? Cartels mushroomed in the chain, taking advantage of the general collapse of the industry as pilfering and cane poaching continued unabated.
Kenya produces sugar at Sh95,000 per tonne on average, meaning sugar from its mills is more expensive than produce from Sudan, Egypt, Swaziland, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. Malawi’s average production cost from its mechanised plantations is Sh35,000 per tonne. Zambia’s single factory at Ilovo produced 249, 227 tonnes of sugar and 49, 998 tonnes of refined sugar after crushing 2 million tonnes of cane. Our own Mumias produced 15,891 tonnes of sugar after crushing 407,008 tonnes of cane.
While purporting to crash cane, managers at Mumias import sugar and package with their own labels. They then turn to the government to subsidise the running of the mill and payment of debts. Every year, the factories sink into debt and pull the farmers deeper into abyss.
Cane farmers must now wake up and face the truth. They have become slaves to a crop that does not make economic sense. All the countries which sell sugar to us rely on plantations and mechanisation.
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