The Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB) Sugar Industry Stakeholders’ Conference 2023 Report

Description

The Kenya Sugar Industry Stakeholders Task Force was established vide a Gazette Notice No. 11711 of 9^th November 2018. The Taskforce recognised the fact that the sugar industry in Kenya was over a century old, with the crop having been introduced in Kenya in 1902 and the first factory being established in 1922 at Miwani in the then Kisumu District. A second factory was established at Ramisi in the Coastal Region in 1927.

Both the Government and the private sector have been key players in the sugar industry. Throughout this period, Kenya attained self-sufficiency in sugar production in 1980 and 1981 with the rest of the period recording deficiencies. The worst case came in the last five years prior to the publication of the Task Force Report 2019, where sugar cane availability failed to match the factory milling capacity forcing most millers to close down for several months each year. Besides acute cane shortage, the industry faces several challenges including the high cost of production, high debt portfolio, declining yields, low-value addition initiatives, inefficiencies, inadequate research and extension, aging equipment, obsolete technology, mismanagement of state-owned mills, reduced income to farmers and weak regulatory framework among others.

The Taskforce, therefore, addressed how to strategically manage the various components of the sugar value chain in order to make them efficient and competitive with a view to bringing the industry back to profitability. To this extent, the task force came up with seven key recommendations as outlined in the diagram and table that follows.

The LREB Sugar Industry Stakeholders Conference 2023 is thus an evaluation of how far the National Government, County Governments, Millers – both public and private- and sugar cane farmers have responded to the recommendations. The conference is also a stakeholders’ engagement exercise that would complement the Sugar Bill 2022. It was with regard to the foregoing that the Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB) in collaboration with all sugar sector players organised the Sugar Industry Stakeholders Conference 2023 to, not only track the progress of the task force report but also to review the report and align it to the Bottom-up Economic Transformation Agenda (BETA) by putting the farmer at the centre of the industry’s transformation.