Principal Secretary for the State Department for Livestock, Jonathan Mueke, announced plans by the government to open a duty-free window for the importation of yellow maize as part of strategic interventions to address a gap in animal feeds. He put a figure to it: 500,000 tonnes of yellow maize. On my Sense tonight, I try to make sense of a growing demand for maize importation.Just today, the Principal Secretary for the State Department for Livestock, Jonathan Mueke, announced plans by the government to open a duty-free window for the importation of yellow maize as part of strategic interventions to address a gap in animal feeds. He put a figure to it: 500,000 tonnes of yellow maize.Now, two weeks ago, Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe gazetted a duty-free window to import white maize, of up to 25 million bags. Kagwe explained that the country’s annual demand had risen to 75 million bags and, given the current season’s situation, we were going to face a shortage in the national harvest.All good! Until you interrogate the numbers and the timing.You see, PS Mueke’s declaration that up to 5.5 million 90-kilogram bags of yellow maize will be imported is not backed by any publicly demonstrated evidence of a corresponding shortage.The government’s own justification has been that animal-feed manufacturers are competing with millers for limited white-maize stocks. But that is...
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