It’s said that the worst thing that can happen to anyone on their first visit to a casino is that they should win a large sum at the gambling tables.
The idea here is that if you lose all your money, you may well walk out in disgust, never to return.
But if you win, then you are hooked for life. And not only will you, in time, lose all that you had won initially, but you will regularly return to one casino or another, determined to claw back what you have lost.
Basically, that initial sum you won will have put you on a path to ultimate destitution, as there is no known cure for a gambling addiction.
A similar logic applies to the growing of coffee in Kenya. And for those who are not old enough to have any memory of this, let me explain something about the “coffee boom” of the late 1970s.
Brazil has a unique dominance in the production and trade of coffee. So, if there is any negative impact on Brazil’s coffee harvest, then that impact will be felt globally.
One such impact was the unexpected and exceptionally severe frost, which hit the Brazilian coffee crop in the mid-1970s. With almost half of Brazil’s coffee crops destroyed, the price of coffee beans shot up exponentially in global commodity markets.
Kenya was – then as now – also a significant coffee grower. And in this country, we know nothing of devastating frosts, so our coffee production remained at the usual levels.
Better still for Kenya, that was still a time when the agriculture sector was largely controlled by institutions set up for the benefit of colonial-era settler farmers. And these institutions still worked as well as they had in colonial times.
So, all that extra money went straight into the pockets of coffee growers – something I cannot quite imagine happening today, given how much corruption there is in the agriculture sector.
Virtually overnight, the mostly politically connected persons who had taken over the coffee farms previously owned by the white settlers became millionaires. Any loans they may have taken to acquire these large-scale farms could be easily repaid in full. And Range Rovers promptly replaced the pickup trucks they had used on weekend visits to their farms.
At a more modest level, small-scale coffee growers who had previously never imagined they would ever own cars could proudly walk into a car dealership and identify the pickup they wanted.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that such a windfall, even though limited only to the coffee-growing regions, was bound to have a damaging effect on our national leadership’s psyche.
Having seen this clear proof that, it was possible to generate widespread rural prosperity through growing “the right crop” on both large- and small-scale farms, why would the leadership continue to strive towards a seemingly unattainable “industrialisation”? Why not focus instead on the next cash crop, which might yield the same windfalls as “black gold” (that is what coffee was called back then).
Since that time, Kenyans – both those in top leadership positions and individual entrepreneurs – have never ceased to search for the perfect cash crop.
And at various times, cashew nuts, macadamia nuts; vanilla; silkworms; and many others have been promoted as the salvation of the Kenyan small-scale farmer. We have even had the “farming” of butterflies, snails, crocodiles, and quail. But so far only avocado has shown any real promise.
If you want to see just how this abandonment of dreams of industrialisation – and a focus on supposed low-hanging fruit in the agriculture sector – plays out, you only need look at the present-day county governments.
What is really odd is that although it has long been clear that the “coffee boom” of the late 1970s is not the kind of thing on which any long-term agriculture policy can be based, that it is entirely dependent on weather conditions in Brazil; coffee still has a remarkable hold on the minds of Kenyan leaders at various levels.
Kenyans continue to fetishise coffee.
Just recently, there was a headline in a local newspaper announcing that Taita Taveta was now one of the “fastest growing coffee zones” in Kenya.
There have also been reports of governors in some of the western Kenya counties, either distributing or promising to distribute, coffee seedlings to local farmers, as a first step towards regional prosperity.
These are usually leaders who campaigned on a promise of bringing in investors to build factories and create well-paying jobs.
