A coffee farmer inspects her crop. [Photo: farmerstrend.co.ke]
The government is introducing new reforms in the coffee industry that will support and improve productivity for small-scale coffee farmers.
The new strategies target to address the high cost of production and challenges in accessing planting material that negatively affects production.
The new reforms also aim at reducing the cost of production by offering adequate planting materials and training farmers on good agricultural practices.
The strategies once implemented will also introduce coffee planting to more locations as well as enhancing productivity per tree to more than 10 kilograms up five times from the current national average of two kilograms per tree.
For more than a decade, the coffee subsector has been facing a myriad of challenges among them exploitation by unscrupulous middlemen and farm input challenges.
Last year President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed a 19 member coffee taskforce to come up and implement new coffee regulations that will see the industry regain its lost glory.
The National Coffee Sub-Sector Implementation Committee is calling on the coffee value chain players to support the implementation of the new reforms to benefit those involved as well as the country.
The issue of accessing high yielding coffee varieties is also a challenge that has been addressed by the report.
Kenya has potential to produce more than 300,000 metric tonnes, up from the current 130,000 metric tonnes.