A farmer attending to her crops near Mt Kenya region. [Photo: wikipedia.org]The number of formal workers in agriculture sector earning more than Sh100,000 monthly nearly halved in 2016 reflecting the impact of the weak performance of the sector.Official data shows that the sector had 2,932 employees with a monthly pay of over Sh100,000 in 2016, down from 5,433 workers in 2015. This means 2,501 workers slipped down the pay ladder, representing a 46 percent drop, the steepest across all sectors of the economy, the Nation reports.The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) data shows agriculture contracted by 1.7 percent in the second quarter from a growth of 7.1 percent a year earlier due to poor weather, which also affected last year’s crop.Agriculture is Kenya’s economic backbone, accounting for about a third of the gross domestic product (GDP).KNBS data indicates the sector had a formal workforce of 336,746 in 2016, which means the 2,932 agriculture employees in 2016 with a monthly income of above Sh100,000 accounted for less than one percent of the sector’s total labour pool.More than half (59 percent) of workers in the sector are living on wages of between Sh9,000 and Sh24,000."The drop in the high-paying jobs came amid a slowdown in value-added agriculture which went down to four percent last year from seven percent in 2015, occasioned by insufficient rains during the short rains period," reads part of the report.

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