No soft landing for cotton farming

An agreeable climate and the importation of second-hand clothes in the 1980s led to the rise and fall of the cotton industry in Kenya.

Cotton, Kenya’s oldest cash crop, requires a dry tropical area, loam soil and lots of rainfall to grow.

That is why the British colonial government supported the Giriama tribe to grow and manage the crop with little interference at the beginning of the 19th Century.

According to Cynthia Brantley in her 1981 book, The Giriama and Colonial Resistance in Kenya, the government’s only interference was by giving them credit facilities.

The government further enacted the Kenya Cotton Ordinance in 1932. It encouraged the growth of cotton in the wider coastal region and Nyanza.

According to B.S Boyle in the 2012 book, Seaports and Developments, between the 1950 and 1960s, cotton was Mombasa’s principal export. Other developments in the sector included the establishment of the East African Cotton Research in 1950.

In 1955, the Cotton Act established Kenya Cotton Lint and Seed and Marketing Board (CLSMB) to intervene in cotton production and marketing.

The Act further allowed the formation of cotton co-operatives to oversee input supply and payment to farmers.

This success spread to Central and Rift Valley provinces and Tana River District through the Hola and Bura irrigation schemes.

CONDUCIVE CLIMATE

Cotton growing was mainly practised by small-scale farmers and it soon spread to Western Kenya in 1963. The climate in the region was conducive to cotton growth.

Thus, in 1963, the first factory to transform cotton into textile – the Kisumu Cotton Mills (Kicomi) – was opened in Western Kenya. But that was only seven years before the crop’s fortunes began taking a downward spiral.

The fall of Kenya’s cotton began in the 1970s. Over the years, Uganda was the primary source of cotton exports through Mombasa.

However, the fear of regional trade between Kenya and Uganda due to the political instability caused by Milton Obote’s regime in 1971, led to the rapid decline of cotton production in the country.

Other factors that led to the decline were the 1978-8 drought in the country, high prices of world oil and the collapse of the East African Community (EAC) in 1977.

These events raised the costs of industrial cotton production and cotton exportation in Uganda and Tanzania.

In the early 1980s, the industry had a slight upsurge. Textiles and clothing production expanded with aid from the Kenyan government and donor agencies, such as USAID, the European Union and the World Bank.

The western Kenya cotton mills experienced high sales, profits and investments. These benefits provided more options for consumers and jobs for the locals.

The world economic recovery between 1985 and 1986 also enabled Kicomi, Raymonds and Rift Valley Textiles (Rivatex) mills to profit.

This success made the cotton textile industry the leading manufacturing activity in Kenya, both in terms of size and employment.

For instance, according to a report by the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) in 2005 titled Kenya’s Apparel and Textile Industry, the cotton sector alone hired 30 per cent of the labour force and over 200,000 farming households out of the total national manufacturing sector in the early 1980s.

The fall of the Kenyan cotton industry came with the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the mid-1980s.

The SAPS were introduced to liberalise trade, which led to the influx of second-hand clothing (mitumba) from the developed countries. The mitumba were sold in Kenya at lower prices than textiles from the country’s cotton mills.

In the 1990s, the Kenyan cotton industry was seriously shrinking. According to Njeru Githae, the former assistant Minister of Justice in the Mwai Kibaki government (2003-2012), the marketers of Kicomi and Rivatex companies came up with tactics to counter the mitumba influx.

Some traders bought suits and shirts from Kicomi and Rivatex and changed the label to read: “made in UK”. “Kenyans bought them without knowing the difference,” said Githae during an April 27, 2005 parliamentary debate.

A chain of bad events faced the cotton industry in 1991. For instance, the industry regulator, Cotton Board of Kenya (CBK), collapsed.

The cotton co-operative movement also flopped. Cotton yield dropped from 120,000 bales to 5,000. Seeds were contaminated and farmers lacked access to credit to buy inputs.

Once again, the government stepped in. It embarked on efforts to revive the industry through privatisation.

According to a 2002 report by the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA), cotton ginneries that were maintained by growers were privatised.

This led to the rapid growth of the local textile industry, hitting an average capacity of over 70 per cent.

In 2000, the Kenyan cotton industry bounced back on its feet. Global regulation through preferential trade agreements with the European Union and United States of America, such as Cotonou Convention of 2000 and the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), helped the country to have a wider market in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States.

APPAREL EXPORT

In particular, AGOA has increased Kenya’s textile investments to increase. According to the 2005 EPZ report, in the years between 1999 to 2004, the Kenyan cotton exports to the US rose from Sh3.4 million to Sh23.9 billion.

The jobs generated in the sector also increased from about 26,000 in 2002, to 34,000 in 2004. By mid-2000s, the cotton sector employed around 140,000 workers.

This enabled Kenya to attract a $60 million Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in apparel export production, especially in its EPZs. These are from China, India, Mauritius and Sri Lanka.

In 2006, the Kenyan Cotton Act was amended and the Cotton Development Authority (CDA) was established under it.

In its 2012 Status Report, the CDA proposed solutions for revival of the cotton sector. One of these was to increase cotton yields through irrigation. This is what happens in the cotton-producing states such as Brazil and Turkey.

Branding and international bench-marking, such as the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) could also change fortunes for the industry.