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Kenya Must Work With Multinationals On Quality to Attract Them to Local Produce

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4 years ago

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Almost six odd decades ago Marshall McLuhan coined the term ‘global village’ and professed that advances in technology would shrink and at the same time expand the world’s culture to allow for instantaneous sharing of culture in the fashion of a physical village. He had seen the possibilities of technology and the inherent ability of tech to connect people such that events in one part of the world would increasingly have a bearing in all the other parts of the world. This global village has both been celebrated and condemned with critics of globalization arguing that globalization is nothing but the expansion of the American cultural, economic and political way of life. The debate of the merits and demerits of globalization though fairly polemical, played itself clearly in the potato debate that Kenyans were engaged in a few days ago.

This recent potato debate that was elicited by one of the global multinationals raised a lot of very important discussions around global supply chains, brand reputations, and most importantly glaring issues with the Kenyan agricultural industry and multinationals’ contribution to both our monetary economy and cultural economy. The critical question is, what is Kenyan about a multinational if even the raw materials sold to Kenyans by a global franchise are imported?

You see if a multinational is running short of an agricultural produce that is in high supply locally, then we must ask questions. One very encouraging aspect of the debate that emerged was Kenyans robust understanding of very critical issues about agriculture and interestingly, the global supply chain including issues of quality and tracing the finished product back to the farmer. The digital platform clearly gave Kenyans a platform to not only ventilate and raise issues but also to share knowledge and exchange ideas. From WhatsApp groups to Facebook and Twitter handles, Kenyans were oozing knowledge.

Granted, multinationals have to adhere to standards given that the global village that we live in is thoroughly Coca Colarised and McDonaldlised and these global brands have to adhere to strict standards for a global clientele regardless of whether the client is in Costa Rica, Jinhua in China or Kimathi street in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. However, in maintaining these standards are we saying that Kenyans cannot elevate the quality of our waru to global standards? Does it mean that a multinational has been making profits in Kenya while promoting the profit-making activities of farmers in other countries? Doesn’t that essentially mean that the forces that are globalized are killing our economic activities?

One critical argument that emerged is the issue of knowledge transfer and building the capacity of local farmers as a trade-in for allowing global franchises to mint millions in Kenya. The crux herein is whether knowledge transfer should be part of allowing these multinationals in Kenya and how to enforce that. A number of stakeholders in farming and the wider agricultural industry have lamented the lack of cooperation or even stubbornness among Kenyan farmers who they claim have adamantly stuck to their farming methods that do not meet global standards.

But whether these farmers are stubborn, ignorant or even naive, there has to be a way out of ensuring the raw materials processed are from locals or are locally grown. It should not matter whether the multinational imports farmers or builds capacity or even pays through the nose, at least there ought to be a threshold of what they can import. For all these years, we cannot sit back and say that our farmers cannot elevate their production to the standards that meet global quality demands. The burden of getting that sort of quality should be the multinational’s headache and the regulatory requirements should simply be enforceable. The rest should be left to whoever wants to do business in Kenya to find a way. It is the multinationals that need the Kenyan market and it is fairly strange that they would be allowed to mint millions from the Kenyan market and not invest in the Kenyan farmers.

Marwan Kraidy talks about globalization within the context of hybridity and argues that the global brands that sell do so because of capitulation to the seduction of otherness and not because of mutation and renewal of identity. The presence of a multinational in Kenya simply means that Kenyans have embraced the global and it incumbent upon the multinational to help Kenyans also globalise the local. The trade-in for having a multinational here in Kenya should encourage the globalization of the local and the localisation of the global.