When Politics Decides What Grows: Kenya's Uneasy Relationship with Sustainable Farming

Drive through the North Rift during planting season and you will see the same scene most years: long lines of farmers standing outside National Cereals and Produce Board depots, waiting on subsidized fertilizer that may or may not actually show up on time. It is a small, physical snapshot of a much bigger story. In Kenya, whether farming moves toward something genuinely sustainable, or stays locked in a cycle of short-term survival, has less to do with soil science than with who holds power, how national and county governments divide responsibility, and which policies manage to survive contact with an election cycle.

Agriculture is not a side issue in Kenyan politics. It is the main event. The sector makes up 22% of GDP and supports more than 70% of the rural population, which means farm policy is never just farm policy. It is jobs policy. It is poverty policy. And, whether anyone says so loud, it is votes.

Out in the field: maize farming remains the frontline of Kenya's sustainability debate

That reality shapes everything from budget allocations to which crops get research funding to how quickly a drought response reaches a farmer's field. Understanding sustainable agriculture in Kenya means understanding the politics wrapped around it, because the two are impossible to separate.

 

The Fertilizer Trap

Nothing captures the tension between short-term political wins and long-term sustainability, which is quite like fertilizer subsidies. Kenya has been running some version of a subsidy program since 2007, and the current National Fertilizer Subsidy Program has become a genuine political flashpoint. Not because the underlying goal is wrong, but because of how that goal collides with the messier realities of governance.

A maize plantation in Kenya ; one of the crops most exposed to shifts in fertilizer policy and rainfall patterns

The mechanics are worth understanding. The government tenders for imported fertilizer, has it bagged, and routes it through NCPB storage facilities across the country. Farmers then redeem a set quota through an e-voucher system that is supposed to add traceability and cut down on the kind of leakage that plagued earlier versions of the program. On paper, it is a sound design.

In practice, it has been rocky enough that the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission had to launch dedicated compliance monitoring, specifically because of allegations involving counterfeit fertilizer, poor targeting of the farmers who need it, and straightforward procurement fraud. In Parliament, members from the North Rift have raised formal statements describing farmers who queue for hours at NCPB depots only to discover the fertilizer they were promised hasn't arrived, or that there's a frustrating gap between being notified they qualify and actually being able to collect anything.

There is a subtler problem buried in here too, one that is more about agronomy than corruption. The subsidized fertilizer being distributed is NPK, but a large share of farmers, especially in regions grappling with acidic soils, would rather have DAP, which the subsidy program does not cover. So even when the coordination work and the fertilizer arrive on schedule, it is not always the fertilizer the land needs. That is a policy decision with a real sustainability cost, made because scaling one uniform product nationally was administratively simpler than tailoring subsidies to regional soil conditions.

The pattern is worth sitting on. Subsidies are politically popular because they are immediate and visible: a farmer either gets cheap fertilizer before planting season or does not, and either way, word travels fast in a constituency. Soil health, crop rotation, groundwater management: these play out over years, not election cycles, and they consistently lose the competition for funding and attention against anything that delivers a photographable win before the next vote.

 

Devolution Changed the Rules 

Kenya's 2010 constitution pushed a significant share of agricultural authority down to the 47 county governments, and this has genuinely reshaped how farming policy gets made and delivered. Under the current division of labor, national government handles policy leadership, national standards, and strategic coordination, while counties are responsible for frontline service delivery: extension services, local data collection, and, increasingly, their own agricultural innovation hubs. The newly introduced Kenya Agricultural Data, Information and Digital Policy lean directly on this split, planning to route satellite-based drought monitoring and climate-smart farming tools through exactly this kind of national-county coordination.

Devolution was supposed to make agricultural support more locally responsive, and in a lot of places, it genuinely has. A county government closer to its own farmers can, in theory, respond faster to a localized pest outbreak or a specific soil problem than a ministry office in Nairobi ever could. But devolution has also multiplied the number of political actors with a direct stake in how agricultural resources get distributed, which means a national commitment does not always survive the trip down to the county level with its original intent intact.

A national climate resilience strategy is only as effective as 47 separate county administrations' willingness and capacity to implement it, and that capacity varies enormously. Some counties have built out genuinely useful extension networks and local data systems. Others are stretched thin, understaffed, or simply prioritizing other visible infrastructure projects over slower agricultural investment. The result is a country where sustainable farming support is not uniform. It depends heavily on which county a farmer happens to live in, and how that county's leadership has chosen to spend its share of devolved funds.

 

The Money Is There — On Paper

To be fair to the current administration, the ambition on paper is real, and it is substantial. Kenya recently rolled out the National Agri-Food Systems Investment Plan, known as NASIP, covering 2026 through 2030. It is a five-year, 1.081 trillion-shilling roadmap aimed at modernizing agriculture and creating more than two million jobs, launched with considerable fanfare at the FINAS financing summit in Nairobi. Alongside it, the Climate Smart Agriculture Strategy has been running since 2017, carrying a price tag north of 500 billion shillings and built specifically around helping the sector adapt to erratic rainfall while cutting emissions.

These are not empty documents. They represent genuine technical work, developed with input from international partners, agricultural economists, and, at least on paper, farmer representatives. The vision they describe of a climate-resilient, lower-carbon agricultural sector that still delivers food security and economic growth, is exactly the kind of thing sustainability advocates have been asking for.

But there is a persistent gap between headline investment figures and what shows up in annual budget allocations, and that gap tells its own political story. In the 2025/26 national budget, the agriculture sector's core allocation was reduced, dropping to 47.6 billion shillings from about 54.6 billion the year before, even as the government simultaneously expanded its fertilizer subsidy spending. With Kenya's public debt now sitting above 10 trillion shillings, the kind of agricultural spending that produces immediate, visible relief keeps getting funded even as the slower, less flashy investments in infrastructure and long-term resilience get quietly squeezed. That is not really a technical funding decision. It is a political one, made about which kind of agricultural spending buys more goodwill before the next election cycle.

This is where good intentions on paper and actual governing behavior tend to diverge. A five-year, trillion-shilling investment plan is easy to announce. Sustaining the annual budget discipline needed to fund it, year after year, through multiple election cycles and competing national priorities, is a much harder political commitment to keep.

 

What Happens When the Rains Fail

The clearest recent test of all this came this year. The 2026 long rains failed across the North Rift and parts of Western Kenya, and independent agronomists have estimated that maize production could fall millions of bags short of the strategic reserve target. The crisis was made worse by a wave of counterfeit fertilizer seizures, including one raid that intercepted 3,500 fake bags in Uasin Gishu County alone, undermining farmer’s confidence in the subsidy system at exactly the moment they needed to trust it most.

President Ruto's response was to promise heavily subsidized fertilizer and seeds as emergency relief to farmers facing the shortfall. It is not an unreasonable instinct. Farmers staring down a failed season need immediate, practical support, and a government that ignored that need entirely would rightly face criticism. But it's also the same reflex that has defined Kenyan agricultural politics for roughly two decades: respond to crisis with a subsidy announcement, rather than treating drought resilience, water management, and diversified cropping systems as the standing infrastructure they need to be well before disaster hits.

Climate-smart agriculture strategies exist on paper precisely to reduce how often this kind of emergency-response cycle must be repeated. Satellite-based early warning systems, drought-resistant seed varieties, water harvesting infrastructure, diversified crop calendars: these are the tools that are supposed to soften a bad rainy season before it becomes a national food security crisis. But their payoff arrives on a multi-year timeline, which makes them easy to underfund quietly, right up until a bad season forces an expensive, highly visible emergency response anyway. The irony is that money spent reactively, in crisis mode, often ends up less efficient than the same money spent proactively would have been.

 

The Human Cost of Political Timelines

It is worth pausing on what this cycle looks like for the people living through it. Smallholder farmers, who make up the overwhelming majority of Kenya's agricultural workforce, are the ones absorbing the consequences of policy decisions made on political rather than agronomic timelines. A farmer in Makueni County dealing with increasingly unpredictable weather does not experience "declining donor support" or "domestic resource mobilization" as abstract policy language. She experiences it as a bank that will not extend credit against an unpredictable harvest, a subsidy voucher that arrives after the optimal planting window has already closed, or a fertilizer bag that turns out to be counterfeit.

Financing has become and especially pointed issue in recent conversations among agricultural stakeholders. As traditional donor support to Kenya's agricultural sector has declined, government officials, development partners, and financial institutions have started pushing harder for financing models built around how smallholder farmers live and work, rather than conventional lending products designed for more predictable borrowers. That shift, if it holds, could matter more for long-term sustainability than another round of fertilizer subsidies ever could. But it requires exactly the kind of patient, multi-year institutional follow-through that Kenyan agricultural politics has historically struggled to sustain.

 

Where This Leaves Sustainable Farming

None of this means sustainable agriculture is a lost cause in Kenya, or that the ambition behind these strategies is not genuine. The frameworks already in place, NASIP, the Climate Smart Agriculture Strategy, the new digital agriculture policy, are well-designed by international standards, and they reflect real technical expertise. The bottleneck is not a lack of innovative ideas. It's political durability: whether a given administration, and the 47 counties it depends on for actual implementation, will keep funding the unglamorous, multi-year work that resilience requires, rather than defaulting again and again to the subsidy cycle that's easier to announce and easier for a farmer to feel by the next planting season.

Sustainable agriculture, almost by definition, asks for the kind of patience that electoral politics rarely rewards. Soil does not respond to a five-year term. Groundwater tables do not recharge on a budget cycle. Climate resilience, the kind that holds up when the rain fails, gets built slowly, through consistent investment that does not make for a dramatic campaign promise.

Until that mismatch narrows, through better-targeted subsidies that account for regional soil differences, real and sustained anti-corruption enforcement in programs like the NFSP, and county governments equipped with the staff and funding to match national-level ambition, Kenyan farming will likely keep oscillating between genuinely promising long-term strategy and the same short-term fertilizer scramble every time the rains disappoint. The plans exist. What is still being tested is whether Kenyan politics can hold onto them long enough for the soil, the farmers, and the food supply to feel the difference. for many more insights at farm forward we are swift at providing the same