How Kenya's Large Farmers Built a Powerful Lobby: The KNFU in the 1970s
A look at the Kenya National Farmers' Union through Robert Bates's Markets and States in Tropical Africa
In most African countries in the 1970s, farmers were price-takers in a system built against them. Governments set prices, controlled marketing boards and shaped input markets, usually to the detriment of the rural majority. Kenya offers one of the clearest exceptions, and the story runs through one organization: the Kenya National Farmers’ Union (KNFU), known today as the Kenya National Farmers’ Federation (KENAFF).
Political scientist Robert Bates uses the KNFU in his 1981 study Markets and States in Tropical Africa to explain a puzzle. Why do some farmers manage to influence agricultural policy while most do not? His answer says as much about who organizes as about how.
A land structure that survived independence
To understand the KNFU, start with Kenya’s land. After independence, settlement schemes moved about 500,000 people onto more than 1.5 million acres in the former white highlands. That is the well-known part of the story. Bates stresses the less familiar part: about 80 percent of the former white highlands was left intact, and the government took deliberate steps to preserve the large-scale farms.
These farms are few and large. Their share of marketed output has fallen over time, from about 81 percent of the value of marketed agricultural production in 1958 to roughly half by 1974. Even so, in 1974 they still accounted for about half the value of all crops sold in Kenya.
What the KNFU is
Bates describes the KNFU as one of the most important collective efforts of Kenya’s large farmers. According to its own annual report, its main aim is to ensure that the government and industry bodies take farmers’ claims and problems into account. Bates judges it remarkably successful at doing so.
The Union is organized in two ways: by commodity, with committees for beef, dairy products, cereals and coffee, and by geographic area. It enrolls both large and small farmers. Smaller farmers, who are less specialized, mostly take part through the area committees. The more specialized large-scale producers tend to work through the commodity committees.
Whose organization is it?
The membership figures explain much of the Union’s character. Large-scale farmers make up less than 1 percent of Kenya’s agricultural producers, yet they account for more than half of the KNFU’s membership and pay over 80 percent of its subscriptions. They also fill its national offices and staff its commodity committees.
The consequence, Bates argues, is that the KNFU lobbies mainly for programs that benefit “big agriculture.” That bias shows up in public services. Leonard documented it for Kenya’s extension services, and it appears in the government’s credit program, which extended its benefits only to farms with 15 acres or more planted in cereals.
Two price reviews, two outcomes
The clearest test of the Union’s influence came in the mid-1970s.
In January 1975 the government announced a comprehensive review of prices for most major commodities. The KNFU submitted detailed proposals and costings. It was disappointed. Wheat and maize prices were left unchanged, and increases for other commodities were considered too small and too late to help farmers much.
The following year the Union went further. In September 1976 it sent a delegation to see President Jomo Kenyatta and presented carefully prepared memoranda and proposals. This time the results far exceeded its expectations. Maize prices rose 23 percent and wheat prices 20 percent, while beef rose between 15 and 23 percent depending on grade.
There was a cost. Consumer prices were not raised, so many of the government boards that bought and marketed these commodities made substantial losses and relied on government credit to stay solvent.
Did only big farmers benefit?
Bates is candid that the main gains went to large farmers, and that marketing arrangements would have magnified this. But he points out that the price rise was given to all producers. By lobbying for themselves, large farmers produced benefits for farmers as a whole, small ones included, though not to the same degree.
This is the central insight of the case. Higher prices are a shared benefit, and the interests of large and small farmers do often conflict, but a policy framework shaped by large-farm lobbying can still lift everyone.
Why large farmers organize better
Bates grounds the KNFU’s success in the economics of collective action. A higher price helps every producer, whether or not they paid for the lobbying. This gives each farmer an incentive to free-ride and let others bear the costs.
That incentive weakens when producers are few and each produces a lot. A large farmer stands to gain enough from a price rise to justify the cost of lobbying. Large farmers are also often geographically concentrated, which keeps the costs of communicating and coordinating low. Small farmers are numerous, widely scattered, and each markets little, so organizing costs more and rewards each of them less.
The same logic appears elsewhere in the book. The comparison with Ghana’s commercial rice farmers, who combined to push prices up, shows the pattern is not unique to Kenya. Bates also notes that Kenyan estate coffee receives over 90 percent of the world price, against under 66 percent for smallholder coffee. Large farmers’ organizing capacity shows up in what different growers are paid.
Two implications
Bates draws two lessons from this. First, as the number of large farmers grows across Africa, the farming community is likely to become more politically assertive, and conflicts between producers and other interests will intensify. Second, countries with more large farmers, such as Kenya and the Ivory Coast, tend to have agricultural policies that offer more favorable prices to farmers.
He adds a pointed observation. Elsewhere, the agrarian sector benefits from having less inequality, but is also denied the collective advantages that inequality can, ironically, bring.
From union to federation
KENAFF traces its origins to the KNFU. According to its own organizational profile, it was founded in 1946 in Nakuru as the Kenya National Farmers Union. Over the decades it became the federation known today as KENAFF, the apex umbrella farmers’ organization in Kenya.
The organization of the 1970s that Bates studied was a lobby dominated by large-scale farmers. Today’s KENAFF describes itself differently: a non-political, non-profit, democratic and member-based umbrella body for all farmers in Kenya. Its motto is The Farmers’ Voice (Sauti ya Mkulima).
Several things have changed since the Bates years.
- Structure. KENAFF is organized from the ward, through sub-county and county levels and regional economic blocs, up to the national level. This is designed to reach and mobilize farmers across the country.
- Membership. KENAFF registers farmer groups rather than individuals, at KES 3,000 a year, and group work is popular among small-scale and women farmers. Its secretary has said that some people still see KENAFF as an organization for large-scale farmers, and that this is not true.
- Services. The mandate is still lobby, advocacy and policy action. It now also includes free legal support for members whose produce is not paid for by buyers, farmer training, value chain linkages, and the promotion of climate-smart technologies.
- Strategy. KENAFF launched its 2022-2026 Strategic Plan with seven pillars, including lobby, advocacy and policy action, enhanced member services, and a sustainable Kenyan agri-food system. It also launched a 10-year Farm Forestry and Afforestation Programme to mobilize farmers in all 47 counties to plant 10 billion trees between 2021 and 2030.
The core idea that Bates identified in the 1970s has not changed: a farmers’ organization is effective when it speaks with one voice to government. What has changed is the effort to make that voice belong to every farmer, not only the largest.
Why it still matters
The KNFU case is a useful reminder that policy is shaped by who has the means to organize. For anyone working with smallholder farmers today, the question Bates raises remains relevant: how can the many, scattered, small producers build the collective voice that large farmers acquired more easily?
Source: Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (University of California Press, 1981; 2005 edition), pp. 91-95, 126 and 128.
Organizational history and current profile: KENAFF profile on the World Farmers Markets Coalition; KENAFF launches strategic plan and Women farmers counselled to join KENAFF, Kenya News Agency; Farmers’ Federation unveils five-year strategic plan, Capital FM.