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The time is ripe for small-scale farmers in Kenya to belong to aggregate and help them reap the most benefits from their farming activities.
The term aggregation has been used to describe “coming together” of farmers in order to strengthen their likelihood to achieve their goals for sustainability. In essence, aggregation is a multi-stakeholder agreement. It is one of the best strategies to help achieve economies of scale along agricultural value chains. It makes it easier to meet the standard requirement of modern markets and also to address other barriers to access market and agricultural inputs. Unfortunately, currently in Kenya, farmers are unable to distinguish aggregation from other forms of associations that have been considered similar in terms of how they run their activities.
Reducing aggregation into simple “get together” of farmers without putting into place mechanisms of running an effective aggregation model can only lead to failure. For example, an effective aggregation structure should provide access to the market for small-scale farmers and/or access to financing and quality inputs. From this perspective, any group of farmers practicing aggregation should not face any challenge when marketing their produce; which is not the case in Kenya today. In brief, it is expected that for aggregation to take effect, aggregators who are in charge of bringing farmers together – must possess the requisite financial capacity, market networks, and product knowledge; while the aggregates, the farmers, must have the technical capacity to produce the specified quantity of quality produce.
On the other hand, there are cases of “successful” aggregation where farmers have had sufficient access to inputs and market. This is more visible in industrial crop farming like coffee, tea, sugarcane, and floriculture. The only challenge with these success stories or ‘outgrowing’ is that farmers are still exploited and have no bargaining power towards setting the price for their produce.
From my experience in Morocco and France, who have adopted aggregation successfully, more emphasis should be put on drawing structures and procedures of aggregation. Simple regrouping of small scale farmers is not enough and does not automatically qualify for aggregation. In other terms, aggregation should not focus on the number of individuals or farmers who have been brought together but should rather concentrate on the amount and quality of resources pooled together (knowledge, finances, produce, land, inputs).
An aggregation model should operate under certain standardized procedures with arbitration. For example, before an individual farmer creates an association for the purpose of aggregating farmers, they must be vetted by the government or delegated authority to ensure that they as the aggregator: have sufficient market networks, have the required financial ability and proper knowledge relevant to the value chain in question. Likewise, for a farmer to be aggregated, they must meet certain requirements that would enable them to produce quality products.
It is only by doing so that aggregation becomes a win-win situation.
