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Kenya to intensify investment in agricultural research in 2015

Xinhua, March 11, 2015 Adjust font size:

Kenya plans to spend 55 million U. S. dollars on agricultural research in the current financial year, the country's research agency said on Tuesday.

Eluid Kireger, director general of Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), told Xinhua in Nairobi that expenditure on research has remained stagnant over the past few years due to budgetary constraints.

"About half the money will come from government while the rest will come from donors and fees charged to users of the research," Kireger said on the sidelines of the Continental Conference on Research Evidence and Research-Policy Linkages for Adaptation to Climate Change in Africa.

Kireger said the heavy reliance on external funding means that research priorities are not always in line with government objectives.

He said Kenya plans to conduct research on the key export crops such as tea, coffee and sugar as well as on staple crops such as maize, beans, sorghum and potatoes.

According to KALRO, research on tea will concentrate on developing specialized varieties that attract higher price in the international market.

He said current tea variety planted by farmers is flooded in the market and hence the low price. In 2011, Kenya released the purple variety of tea after 23 years of research.

The Ministry of Agriculture said that 95 percent of Kenya's tea exports are sold unprocessed and this denies the country potential foreign exchange revenues.

The East African nation only consumes 6 percent or 7 percent of its total tea production while the rest is exported.

The research body is also seeking to develop early maturing varieties of sugarcane that take less than 14 months before they are harvested as well as those with high sucrose content.

Kireger said that current varieties take up to 18 months to mature. In the field of livestock, KALRO is conducting a pilot study on the use of embryo transplants in the dairy cattle breeds.

The director general said the technology will allow for mass production of improved dairy breeds. "We hope to release this technology to farmers in May," Kireger said. Endi