Agriculture contracts as other economic sectors record growth 

Tea pickers

Workers pick tea leaves at a farm in Nyeri town in this picture taken on February 8, 2021.

Photo credit: Joseph Kanyi | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • Maize, beans, sorghum, millet, tea and coffee recorded reduced productivity in 2021. 
  • Improved production was witnessed in volumes of sugar cane, milk and horticultural products.

Agriculture, Kenya’s economic backbone, was the only sector that contracted last year, by 0.2 per cent, due to poor rainfalls, high prices of inputs and attacks on crops, the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) said yesterday.

In 2020, the sector recorded a growth of 5.2 per cent. KNBS’s Economic Survey 2022 showed that among crops that recorded reduced productivity in 2021 were maize, beans, sorghum, millet, tea and coffee. 

Despite this low productivity, prices for marketed produce went up, explaining the rise in food inflation.

The report showed that maize production decreased to 36.7 million bags from 42.1 million bags in 2020, beans from 8.6 million bags to 7.4 million bags, while coffee production declined by 6 per cent to 34,500 tonnes and tea by 5.6 per cent to 537,800 tonnes.

“This was occasioned by unfavourable weather conditions in various parts of the country, which resulted in reduced crop and livestock production,” the report stated.

Wheat production almost halved from 405,000 tonnes in 2020 to 245,300 tonnes in 2021, the lowest since 2018. The value of marketed maize dropped from Sh8.2 billion to Sh6.9 billion.

While the production of coffee and tea declined, their value went up, to see earnings from coffee almost double from Sh10.8 billion in 2020 to Sh18.6 billion in 2021, while tea earnings rose by 3.2 per cent to Sh126 billion. The report noted that for almost all the crops that had low productivity last year, their marketed value went up.

“Overall, the value of marketed agricultural production increased by 4.3 per cent from Sh505.3 billion in 2020 to Sh527 billion in 2021. Crops contributed the highest share of marketed production in 2021, at 69.3 percent,” the report added.

Improved production was witnessed in volumes of sugar cane, milk and horticultural products.