Kenyans: It’s time to wake and smell the coffee. It’s foul!

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

15 February 2026

When listed agricultural company, Sasini PLC announced in its annual report that it was selling one of its coffee plantation in Kiambu county, the discussion about the profitability of coffee farming was rekindled. Ten years ago (2015), Sasini sold another parcel of land in Nyeri that was also under coffee.

The truth of the matter is that coffee farming has not a very profitable activity for many decades – since the 1970s. In 2018, I touched on the case of Sasini coffee farming. At the time they had made about Sh42 million profit from about 2,000 acres of coffee which worked down to about Sh21,000 per acre for a whole year!

These numbers haven’t changed much since then and so, I am not surprised that the company is selling off it’s coffee plantations. The alternative would be to uproot coffee and grow other crops. That’s what Kakuzi PLC did several decades ago.

Coffee farming makes good fodder for political speeches. Politicians are always telling farmers that there are faceless cartels eating their money and that’s why incomes are so low. I have heard some claiming that other countries are making a lot of money but not Kenya.

So, I looked for the data and found the following. In 2025, Brazil, the world’s largest producer, sold 2.4 billion kilograms of coffee in the world markets and raised $15.6 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money but for a fair comparison, we need to work out the unit price. It comes to about $6.5 per kilogram.

Closer home, Uganda exported 522 million kilograms in 2025 and raised $2.5B. That is, $4.8/kg. Ethiopia, the historical origin of coffee, exported 469 million kg from which they got $2.65B; that is, $5.65/kg.

What about Kenya? Contrary to popular belief, we are a very small player in coffee production. In 2025 we sold a measly 45 million kg (less than a tenth of Uganda and Ethiopia!) which raised a correspondingly small amount of money - $336 million. However, when we work out our unit price, it comes to $7.5/kg. This is higher than what all the major players are getting for their coffee.

So, we must then ask this question: where is the problem? My suspicion is that there is over-production which has depressed world prices as producers compete against one another for the few buyers available. That’s not a cartel; it’s how markets behave naturally. Is the solution then to scale down production? Well, that’s what many (Sasini, Eagaads, Kakuzi etc) have done.