Boost For Tea Farmers As KTDA Import Fertilizer

Tea farmers will benefit from 47,000 tonnes of NPK fertilizer that is expected to arrive in the country in two weeks.

Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) chairman David Ichoho said the first batch of the farm input is expected on October 13, 2022.

“We expect to receive 940,000 bags of NPK fertilizer from Russia next week which will be distributed to the farmers under the subsidy program announced by President William Ruto during his inauguration on September 13, 2022,” said Ichoho.

Ichoho was speaking during a board meeting held last Tuesday. He said that the 47,000 tonnes of fertilizer were expected to arrive in the country in the first week of September, blaming the Russia-Ukraine war for the delays.

Last month KTDA imported 820,000 50kg of fertilizer which was sourced from Russia. It was transported via the Standard Gauge Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi for packaging and was distributed among smallholder farmers. The next arrival of the commodity will bring the total amount imported since last month to 1,760,000 bags.

Farmers have always decried the inflated cost of the commodity which triggered an increase in the production cost. In his intervention, president William Ruto assured farmers of enhanced subsidized fertilizer to boost production.

Farmers are now purchasing a 50kg bag of DAP fertilizer at 3,500 shillings, CAN at 2,875 shillings, and urea at 3,500 shillings. At the same time, NPK is retailing at 3,275 shillings, MOP at 1,775, and Sulphate of Ammonia at 2,220 shillings. Initially, a 50kg bag of fertilizer retailed at between 4200 to 7,000 shillings.

The subsidized fertilizer will play a critical role in the production of the leaf which has been hailed for earning the country high revenue alongside the horticulture sector. Last year, tea accounted for about 19.6 percent of the total domestic exports valued at 130.9 billion shillings. According to the Economic Survey 2022 by the Kenya National Bureau of Statics (KNBS), this was an increase from the 130.3 billion shillings recorded in the previous year.

Despite many hurdles in the tea sector this year, its prices have managed to remain above two dollars per kilo as compared to last year when the prices ranged between $1.80 (215.28 shillings ) and $1.90 (227.24 shillings).

This has been helped by the minimum reserve price of $2.43 (275 shillings) per kilogram that the government introduced last year at the Mombasa tea auction to curb declining earnings by the small-scale growers.

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