Maize Shortage Pushes Flour Prices To Ksh163 As Kenya Plans Imports

Kenya is turning to imports to shore up its strategic maize reserves after a rough growing season left the country facing a significant grain shortfall, Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe has revealed.

The plan is to bring in one million 90-kilogram bags of maize from abroad. It’s a direct response to what officials now expect could be a shortfall of up to 5.4 million bags by the time September rolls around.

Speaking on the matter, he said the scale of the projected deficit calls for swift policy action, cautioning that if production keeps slipping, both food supplies and maize prices could come under even more strain in the months ahead.

The rains showed up earlier than farmers had planned for, only to be followed by a dry spell that struck right when crops needed moisture most, during establishment and flowering. Bloomberg reports that the timing couldn’t have been worse, hitting some of Kenya’s biggest maize-producing regions particularly hard.

But it wasn’t just the skies working against farmers; Kagwe noted that late deliveries of subsidized fertilizer. Farmers who needed that fertiliser during planting season simply didn’t get it in time, which took a further toll on yields.

Kagwe flagged a knock-on effect that’s easy to overlook: when farmers earn less from a weak harvest, they have less cash to reinvest in seeds and fertiliser for the next planting round. That could mean the current shortage casts a shadow well into the next growing cycle.

As for the import plan itself, Kagwe indicated it may go through a government-to-government deal. The announcement comes on the heels of maize flour prices climbing back in June.

A million bags won’t close the gap. That’s less than a fifth of the 5.4-million-bag deficit officials are bracing for. Which means if harvests fall short of even the current gloomy projections, Kenya may need to go back to the table, either with more emergency imports or by tapping into the strategic reserve itself to keep supply steady.

Households are already feeling the pinch. Kagwe’s own figures show a two-kilogram packet of maize flour selling for between Ksh153 and Ksh163 in June.

That matters because maize isn’t just another crop in Kenya; it’s the backbone of ugali, the staple that shows up on dinner tables in households across the country. If the supply crunch drags on, the worry is that prices climb further, and family budgets already stretched thin get squeezed even more.

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