EDITORIAL: Spur agriculture growth – Business Daily

Although the amount of money allocated to food security, agriculture and related sub-sectors has fallen below the recommended 10 percent of the total Budget, the increase announced by Treasury Secretary Ukur Yatani offers a ray of hope for farmers and urban consumers alike.

For the first time in many years, the allocation to agriculture has also been delinked from “rural and urban development”, which made it difficult to ascertain just how much money was going to support farming and how much was being used to build roads in urban areas.

This distinction ought, ideally, to make the tracking of spending on support for agriculture easier and should lead to higher accountability. Every year, billions of shillings are allocated for irrigation, but there is hardly much to report in terms of actual work on the ground. This should give public and State officials in that ministry food for thought. Indeed, they need to show the public what they have done with the money since the ministry was hived off from Water.

Government agencies also need to be alive to the reality that without food security, other aspects of national life, such as health, education, security and industrialisation are imperiled. As such, the need to support agriculture goes beyond stabilising food prices and combating pests. It is at the very heart of national construction and this calls for a multi-sectoral approach to ensuring that the money allocated to the sector is spent as intended to achieve the desired goals.