Dissatisfied with their inability to access favorable markets for their crop, coffee farmers in Kisii are considering abandoning coffee to take up subsistence farming.

One such farmer is Beatrice Bioyani, a 25-year old coffee farmer, who owns a farm jointly with her mother-in-law. They have a two-acre piece of land from which they managed a harvest of 2,000 kgs of coffee beans in 2005.

“But before we uproot the coffee trees we are thinking to intercrop but this lowers the production of quality coffee beans,” she remarks.

She had pinned her hopes on an improvement in the situation to enable her provide and sustain her family to a reasonable living standard.

“Payments can take as long as a year to be processed,” she narrates, “it is especially difficult if money is needed urgently to pay school fees.”

Bioyani is a resident of Nyabomite village in Nyamira district and has been farming coffee for the last five years. She is one of the farmers invited to the National Stakeholders’ Roundtable Conference for the Kenyan coffee sector organized by Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) in May.

NCA is working closely with the organization Building Eastern Africa Community Network (BEACON) and African Woman and Child (AWC) Feature Service in the campaign for economic justice in the Kenyan coffee sector. The campaign aims at increasing the returns for Kenyan coffee growers at the bottom of the production chain.

In Kenya, seventy percent of coffee is grown on farms that have less than twenty-five acres, of which most is family owned or in private hands.

In Kenya, both plantations and small-scale farmers are engaged in coffee production, with the small-scale farmers dominating the sector. Among the small-scale farmers in Kenya, ownership of as little as one or two acres of land per family is common. Coffee is Kenya’s fourth largest foreign exchange earner after tea, horticulture, and tourism.

Since the turn of the century, the price of coffee has fallen by almost 50 per cent, to a 30-year low. This global crisis is destroying the livelihoods of 25 million coffee farmers around the world.

Developing country coffee farmers, mostly poor smallholders, now sell their coffee beans for much less than it costs to produce. Oxfam’s report ‘Mugged’ captures this contradiction: “Farmers sell at a heavy loss while branded coffee sells at hefty profit”.

But Kenya is no exception to this global disaster. While output has decreased in the past few years, Kenya still produces some of the world's top grade Arabica coffee beans, being highly valued as a mild acidic blending coffee, used in small quantities by many international roasters to moderate and improve their standard blends.

Altogether, Kenya’s annual output is now an approximately one million bags of coffee (2003/04, ICO 2004). Kenya holds about 12 percent of Africa’s total production, but only 0.93 percent of the world’s total production of coffee.

Susan Moraa Onchiri who has been a coffee farmer since the 1950’s, says that the market access situation has changed so much today in comparison to when she started growing coffee.

“I started intercropping coffee with food crops in 1980, when the returns from coffee became low and unpredictable,” she explains.

She adds that she managed to educate her 12 children from the money she earned from coffee then. Today, she is about to throw in the towel and give up coffee farming altogether because in her own words: “I do not see what I am getting out of it.”

Moraa owns 200 coffee trees favours intercropping with maize because it gives her higher returns.

For Milka Nyamoita Buoma and her husband, the last ten years have not been generous to them. They are unhappy with the payments received from the cooperative union which markets their coffee.

“The government should extend loans to us to enable us boost our coffee bean production and also enable us to find ready markets. This will in return help us improve our livelihoods,” she explains.

An option that these farmers have is to sell their coffee through brokers who give them Ksh. 20 (US cents 3.5) for a two kilogram tin of coffee beans.

Even the Director of Kisii Coffee Farmers Union, Robert Mainya concurs with the farmers when he admits that some societies have not paid farmers for the last five years.

“This forces us to avoid taking our coffee to the Kenya Planters Co-operative Union (KPCU) and instead we prefer Thika Coffee Mills whose services are better,” he notes.

He adds that when the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK) used to market their coffee, they used to give farmers qualification reports but this is no longer the case with KPCU. He says that the reports are important because they help the farmer to make improvements on their farming methods.

“I suggest the KPCU by-laws be amended to in boost the services that the co-operative unions render to the small-scale farmers,” he adds.

Wilfred Orina Onyangosi a manager at the Nyabomite Co-operative Union is of the opinion that the delays in payment are demoralizing and further discourage farmers from taking their coffee beans to the co-operative union.

However this unfortunate situation only serves to perpetuate the vicious cycle: “The longer farmers keep their coffee beans at home the more the deterioration in the quality of their produce, making it even more difficult to market the crop favourably,” he explains.