Fueled by Coffee : Kenya--A New Aroma of Prosperity

Francis Ngunye has lived on a steep hillside, in a hut of thin, hand-smoothed logs, for half a century, tending enough corn and bananas to feed his family and enough coffee to buy a little fertilizer and insecticide.

But recently a new house of stone blocks, with a shiny tin roof, sprouted beside the hut. It is a house that coffee built. Ngunye’s coffee has also bought another small patch of farmland and a modest commercial lot in the city.

Ngunye, 55, is part of an agricultural middle class that is beginning to flourish in Kenya, thanks to coffee. Like growing numbers of others here, he has turned from subsistence farming to cash crops. And many analysts consider their success stories a key to the future economic and political stability of Africa.

‘Live More Comfortably’

“Now I am able to live more comfortably than my father,” Ngunye said on a recent afternoon.

He paused a moment to consider his fortunes. A double-knit beige cardigan covered his shoulders, stooped from a lifetime of work on this abrupt slope of rich red soil in Kenya’s highlands. He farms just two acres of land, a tract barely big enough to live on in rural America, much less make a living on. But he has something Midwest farms do not--740 coffee trees.

“Coffee,” Ngunye concluded, “is keeping me happy.”

For decades, vast coffee and tea estates owned by Europeans dominated Kenyan agriculture. Baroness Karen von Blixen’s 600-acre coffee plantation, described in her book, “Out of Africa,” and in the 1985 film based on the book, was typical. Black Africans were prohibited from growing cash crops in Kenya until shortly before independence in 1963.

Dramatic Change

But recently there has been a dramatic change in coffee cultivation. The estates’ share of production has been dwarfed by that of the Africans who farm tiny tracts once devoted solely to feeding their families. Now 70% of the coffee crop and 45% of the tea crop come from farms of fewer than 10 acres.

Charles Bolduc of the World Bank office in Nairobi said: “We’re dealing with a different level of farmer in Kenya than we’ve dealt with in other African countries. They need marketing and management talent now. You can’t call them subsistence farmers any more.”

The heart of Kenya’s coffee-growing region is central Kenya, south of the Equator between Nairobi and Mt. Kenya, in cool, thin air a mile above sea level. Some of the old estates still cover gentle hills beside the main roads, shaded by giant broadleaf trees. They form a neat gridwork of pure coffee, often owned by groups of well-to-do Kenyans.

But take a turn off the pavement and the scenery changes. Rutted roads just wide enough for the wooden carts heaped with the red coffee berries meander through lush hills that rise sharply from clear streams.

A patchwork of crops clamor for space on the slope: rows of coffee trees, each standing seven feet high; rows of corn, the mainstay of the rural diet; broadleafed banana trees; a mango tree or two; a tilled plot of vegetables, and a gnarled assortment of wild, flowering bushes.

These are the farms of Kenya’s small farmers. Most are less than five acres--very small by American standards. When coffee is brewing in a house, folks here say, the breeze carries the rich aroma across the hillside to neighboring farms.

A Level of Prosperity

These farmers are not wealthy. Most of them still go to market on foot, taking their coffee in wooden carts. A small pickup truck is a much-prized possession. But they are slowly acquiring clothing and silverware, lanterns and linens--household goods that were beyond their reach only a few years ago.

William W. Mburu, 59, retired two years ago as spare parts manager at an automobile shop in the town of Kiambu and began growing coffee. He has 200 producing coffee trees now and 400 trees maturing. Yet the venture has already paid off.

“Coffee bought me this,” Mburu said, proudly placing his hand on a royal blue, five-year-old Toyota pickup truck that, like many pickups in rural America, has his name and address lettered on the side.

Government workers still account for much of Kenya’s middle class. The country has few factories such as those that gave birth to a blue-collar middle class in Western societies, and in any case factory wages are low. Many of Kenya’s shopkeepers, also middle class, are Asians from India and Pakistan.

Middle Class in Zambia

Among other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, only Zambia has an emerging middle class of small farmers growing crops for profit. A few countries have the potential to nurture an agricultural middle class, but so far there are few exceptions to the pattern of subsistence farms owned by the poor and plantation farms owned by the wealthy or the government.

“Kenya still has the big plantations, but it hasn’t stopped the middle-class farmer from getting a piece of the action as well,” a Western analyst says.

The new breed of farmer has emerged in Kenya for several reasons. This has been a boom year for Kenya coffee. A suspension of world export quotas due to fears of a small Brazilian crop will allow Kenya to export nearly 2 million bags of coffee by the end of the year, an increase of more than 15% over last year.

High Quality Coffee

Kenya’s arabica coffee accounts for only 2% of world production but it is considered among the highest quality, commanding premium prices from buyers who mix it with other, less flavorful coffees. Germany is the largest buyer of Kenyan coffee, followed by the United States.

In the past, small farmers were cut out of the coffee bonanza because of a dilapidated and archaic factory system for processing, a catch-as-catch-can marketing system and the absence of a national extension program to help train farmers. Much of that has changed, and the number of small coffee growers has increased steadily and now approaches 200,000.

One of the reasons for the growth is the Smallholder Coffee Improvement Project. In a little more than three years, the project, financed by the World Bank and the Commonwealth Development Corp., has helped train 90,000 farmers and built or rebuilt about half of the 700 coffee factories run by farm cooperatives in Kenya.

“The coffee boom has come to Kenya and the farmers were ready for it this time,” a Western analyst said.

Financial Cushion

One of Mburu’s neighbors in the Githunguri area, Peter T. Githara, has seven acres--a large farm by local standards--with beans and corn, five dairy cows and 3,200 coffee trees. Githara built a new stone house last year with what he made from coffee. He has a financial cushion for the first time in his life. Disease wiped out half his coffee crop this year, yet he sold his pickup and plans to buy a larger one.

“Life is much better than five years ago,” Githara said. “I’m delighted with coffee.”

Githara, 55, is a fourth-generation farmer, but he was the first of his family allowed to plant coffee when the laws were changed in the mid-1950s.

“Everybody was eager to grow coffee when they started letting us do it,” Githara remembers. But it was not a very lucrative business for small farmers at first. They had little training in cash-crop farming and they had no ready access to factories or export markets.

Key Source of Tea

An estimated 140,000 additional small farmers are growing tea. Fifteen years ago, small farms accounted for less than half the acreage planted in tea and a fourth of the production. Today they control twice as many acres as the estates and produce nearly half the tea, contributing to Kenya’s growing importance in the world tea market. Kenya is Britain’s No. 1 supplier of tea.

Kenyans drink both tea and coffee, in copious quantities. Tea, served with large amounts of sugar and a few drops of milk, is still the favorite beverage here, a remnant of the days when this was a British colony.

But Kenyan coffee drinkers have been around at least since the missionaries began growing coffee here. Asked if he drinks coffee, farmer Githara smiles broadly. “ Sana ,” he says. A lot.

Although Kenya has been producing coffee for decades, the crop’s heyday is more recent. In 1977, coffee prices soared and the country suddenly found itself flush with foreign exchange. But Kenya overindulged in the windfall; the government went on a spending binge instead of prudently assessing where to invest the new foreign exchange. Coffee prices then declined the next year, and by 1980, there were lines for bread, imported goods disappeared from shops, and thousands of young men surged into the cities in search of work.

Slow Recovery

Between 1980 and 1983, Kenya’s balance-of-payments deficit tripled, to nearly $3 billion. The country has only recently begun to recover, using a few good years for tea and this year’s coffee boom to halt the slide and begin chipping away at the deficit.

Coffee accounts for almost 40% of Kenya’s foreign exchange earnings, and government officials, while applauding the current coffee boom, have also been urging farmers to use their proceeds to improve the quality of their coffee and not let the euphoria lead the country into another debt crisis.

The future holds many questions for Kenya’s small farmers. Bolduc, the World Bank’s representative here, and other agricultural experts worry about farmers turning to cash crops when Kenya’s population growth--at 4% a year the highest in the world--may signal the need for more food production.

In any case, the coffee export quotas that were suspended by the 75-nation International Coffee Organization in February will likely be reinstituted this year or next at the latest, depending on the frost damage to Brazil’s crop. Experts here say that about a third of this year’s Kenyan crop would have been barred from export if the quotas had been in effect.

An Excess of Coffee

“Kenya still produces much more coffee than it is allowed to export under the quota system,” Bolduc says. “What will it do with the extra coffee?”

But for Kenyan consumers, a wide variety of goods is suddenly available. A shopping mall that opened in northwest Nairobi two years ago was mostly idle for the first year, but in recent months new stores have opened, and on their shelves are toasters, television sets and other imported goods.

“You can see imported goods flowing into Kenya,” a Western diplomat said. “And smallholders in coffee and tea are the reason for it.”