allAfrica.com: The Nation (Nairobi) Kenya
Tea farmers have been asked to concentrate on improving quality instead of increasing acreage.
The international price of tea was unstable and there was no need for farmers to increase acreage, Agriculture minister Kipruto Kirwa said yesterday.
Mr Kirwa said that a world tea meeting he had attended had agreed that farmers should not plant more tea.
He was speaking at Kaptumo Division during a gound-breaking ceremony for a Sh350 million tea factory being built by the Kenya Tea Development Agency and small-scale farmers.
The minister said the meeting had resolved that farmers should be encouraged to improve the quality of their tea.
But Mr Kirwa said tea farmers in the country would not be affected because they had not increased the acreage under tea significantly.
Improve quality
The minister, who was accompanied by Chebut factory directors Henry Ng’etich, Paul Tiongik and John Lelei and Electoral Commissioner Samuel Ngeny, asked the growers to seek advice from agricultural field officers on how to improve quality.
He urged farmers in Nandi North and South districts to venture into horticulture as one way of fighting poverty, saying they had large tracts of underutilised fertile land.
The directors said farmers in the two districts required more than four tea factories to ease congestion at Chebut factory.
The new development is likely to cause concern among officials and members of the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union and the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu), who have in the recent past opposed the introduction of tea picking machines.
Cotu secretary general Francis Atwoli has led unionists’ appeals to the President to suspend the introduction of the machines to save jobs.
