Nairobi, Feb 17, 2009 - Kenya is expected to produce 50,000 tonnes of coffee in 2008/09, down from an earlier estimate of 53,000 tonnes because of dry weather, a senior official at the industry's regulatory body said on Tuesday.
"The short rains failed so that affected the crop. It will be better than last year but not as good as anticipated," Bernard Gichovi, technical manager at the Coffee Board of Kenya, told Reuters.
"The failure of the rains affected ripening and flowering."
Kenyan coffee production is miniscule compared with other global producers but its specialty beans are usually snapped up at premium prices to blend with those from other regions.
The 2007/08 crop came in at 42,000 tonnes after it was hit by a bad case of Coffee Berry Disease whose onset was caused by a prolonged dry spell.
The sector was once the leading foreign exchange earner in east Africa's biggest economy but years of mismanagement caused farmers to abandon their bushes and take up more lucrative activities such as vegetable or dairy farming.
At its peak in the 1987/88 season, the sector produced 130,000 tonnes but harvests have since plummeted as prices fell and the debt owed by Kenyan farmers ballooned.
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Gichovi said although global coffee prices had been favourable in the last few years, problems at home were still discouraging farmers from improving their crop output.
He said labour costs were up and berries went unpicked for days in some instances because labourers wanted better pay.
"Young men in the villages will not do it and those willing to do it are asking for too much," he said.
Estates also had the headache of paying more for irrigation after local authorities raised the cost of water, he said.
Although the government has set up the Coffee Development Fund to improve access to financing for farmers, credit was still an issue and, consequently, the use of inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides was low, he said.
Security was also a big problem. Gichovi said people were stealing beans from trees, warehouses or in transit.
The sector has undergone some reform in recent years but farmers were still getting the short end of the stick, he said.
Some were not receiving payment in the stipulated time but were reluctant to report rogue marketing agents to the regulator, Gichovi said.
Although the government now allows growers to sell directly to buyers overseas, thereby cutting out a string of middlemen, farmers were still using marketing agents to sell their produce.
A total of 31 growers were registered to market their produce when the government introduced the so-called "second window" in 2006 but only 17 are operational now, Gichovi said.
Volumes sold through that system had grown but the sales where still being arranged by marketing agents that have been in the industry for decades.
"Unfortunately, it is still the same players doing it," Gichovi said. "Farmers don't have the capacity, the know-how to venture. They need a lot of education to know what goes on."