TANZANIA BULB ONION TRADERS LOSE MARKET AS KENYANS START GROWING THE CROP

Tanzania bulb onion traders lose as Kenyans start growing the crop
Poor prices and lack of information on growing bulb onions has seen Kenya depend on imports from Tanzania for decades, despite favourable climatic and soil conditions.

However, this is bound to change as more farmers are taking up bulb onion farming, according to Dennis Muchiri, market and trade officer at the Farm Concern International (FCI).

“Farmers did not have adequate information on onions agronomics, but now they do. As a result, we have recorded a major decrease in imports of onions from Tanzania,” he said. 

FCI that has introduced farmers to better onion growing practices, use of high yielding hybrid seeds, and a marketing system that eliminates brokers. And the change has been evident. “Five years ago, we would hardly make $150 from cultivating a quarter an acre crop using the non-certified seeds. Today, using the hybrid seeds, we are able to make $970 from the same size of land,” said Paul Mariaga, a 24-year-old farmer in Embaringo village in Kieni.

The number of farmers growing onions in Kieni has also risen, encouraged by the Youth in Agricultural Trade and Enterprises model initiatives established by FCI under the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Farmers are organised into a commercial villages, where they are educated as a group on better crop husbandry and post-harvest handling. They are then linked to agro-dealers and traders.

Farmers under the commercial village buy farm inputs as a group, benefitting from the economies of scale. They get the inputs directly from the appointed dealers to avoid counterfeit inputs like seeds and chemicals. The same model is applied when selling their crop, where they are collectively introduced to traders who buy in bulk.
Three years ago, a kilo of bulb onions was going for 0.11US cents. Today, the price ranges from 0.35 US cents to $1.

It is such developments that have pulled in more farmers, increasing the crop output that has reduced imports from Tanzania.
Evelyn Wambui, a bulb onion dealer at the Wakulima Market in Nairobi said there is an increase in supply for onions from Kenya which has helped stabilise the prices as previously all the crop was imported from Tanzania.

“We are getting more supplies from areas like Kieni. When I started dealing in onions 11 years ago, there was hardly any supply from Kenya. What we used to get was of low quality and so we settled for the Tanzania crop. But now, we are seeing bigger and better quality bulb onions from Kenya,” she said