Coffee Production to Drop by 1O% as High Cost of Fertilizer Bites

The high fertilizer costs in Kenya are projected to cut coffee production by 10 percent to 700,000 bags for the 2022-23 season.

Many coffee farmers across the coffee growing areas across the country are experiencing low yields caused by reduced fertilizer application.

A 50Kg bag of fertilizer now costs 6000 shillings, a 71 percent increase from fertilizer prices in 2021.

Moreover, the shortage of planting materials such as coffee seeds curtails the growth of new coffee plantations. The Kenya Coffee Research Institute estimates that it produces only 136.078 kilograms of coffee seeds for development into seedlings against a rising demand of 1,360.7 to 1,814.3 kilograms of seeds.

With reduced coffee production in the country, coffee exports are expected to drop as low as 670,000 bags from the current 750,000 bags.

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However, a report by the US Department of Foreign Agriculture estimates that the area under coffee will slightly increase from the current 104,000 to 105,000. The data states that due to the high coffee prices, the framers will use abandoned trees in 2021-22 for a ripe future harvest.

As much as the domestic coffee consumption is projected to increase from 30,000 bags to 32,000 bags as the tourism sector recovers from the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic, it will also be constrained by a high inflation rate that reduces the consumers’ purchasing power.

Kenya, which is among the top five coffee producers in Africa, produces 800,000 bags of coffee annually. The coffee industry export earnings have improved by 33 percent between 2014 and 2021.