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World’s top stevia buyer braves it back to Kenya, after crash with novel crop

Stevia
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Kenyan farmers could soon be producing stevia– a high-earning herb with the fastest growing market in the world– for export as the leading global stevia producer is rumoured to be returning to Kenya. FarmBizAfrica reveals the tough journey that collapsed three partners’ first foray into the Kenyan market.

The global stevia market has grown by 6.8 per cent between 2018 – 2023 reaching a valuation of Sh68.9 billion. Driven by consumer demand for a sweetener alternative to sugar– a leading cause of diabetes and obesity– especially in beverages, this market demand is expected to increase to Sh113 billion by 2034. 

Eight years after it exited the Kenyan market, PureCircle– the leading global stevia producer for the beverage and food industry– is looking to enlist seedling producers and recruit farmer aggregators who will recruit farmers to grow the herb after the company finished conducting studies on the best stevia varieties for Kenya. 

When the company first set up camp in Kericho and started contracting stevia growers in Kenya around 2013, many farmers were eager to grow the crop which had an earning potential of over Sh80,000 an acre.

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The company first set up a partnership with James Finlays, now Browns Investments PLC, that would see the company’s out-grower tea farmers in Kericho and Bomet plant the natural sweetener in small portions from which tea bushes would be uprooted and on spaces on their land not covered by tea as a way to supplement their incomes. 

Stevia takes just three months to mature and is harvested every four to six weeks. Earning farmers up to Sh400 for every kilogram of dried stevia they produced after 10 days, provided an ideal supplementary crop to tea for which farmers are paid a stipend every month and receive a lump sum ‘bonus’ twice in the year.

Despite working out perfectly on paper for all three parties, ‘on the ground’ the program failed to take flight. 

Tea land in Kericho had as low a soil pH as 3.09 which was too acidic for stevia which requires soils with 6.5–7.5 neutral pH. Tea which is a heavy feeder also hoovered up most of the rainwater and nutrients from the soils depriving the stevia plants.

Farmers needed to spend extra money to amend the soil and even once they did this, given many tea farms are surrounded by trees and the two counties border the Mau Forest Complex, they then had to invest in electric fencing and manual labour (both of which had a limited impact and proved too costly) to keep off monkeys which acquired a sweet tooth for the natural sweetener.

Eventually, Finlays, PureCircle, and the farmers called quits on the partnership.

PureCircle then partnered up with Stevia Life Sweeteners, a stevia exporter in China. The two companies were however limited to still sourcing farmers from Kericho and Bomet where PureCircle had already acquired NEMA’s Environmental Impact Assessments permits as stevia was still at the time considered a new crop species in Kenya whose potential environmental impact had not been fully assessed.

Between 2004 and 2008, the Jatropha plant, whose oil seeds can be processed into biodiesel, was promoted in Kenya as a wonder crop that would bolster the incomes of arid farmers but wound up being an invasive weed that left farmers poorer and poisoned goats and sheep that ate it.

NEMA was keen to avoid a potential repeat with the ‘alien’ stevia crop but PureCircle had to pay up to Sh400,000 to get a permit for two to three new farmers growing the crop on an eighth acre in Meru or Narok. 

Almost a decade later, stevia can be freely grown across Kenya and the company will not have to bear any NEMA ‘new crop’ costs. 

The few new farmers the company could snag faced challenges in meeting its stringent drying requirements. Stevia should be sundried immediately after harvest to avoid the leaves and shoot flowering or growing mouldy after which they cannot be used. Sun drying proved a challenge for farmers as they could not always get ideal still sunny weather in which the leaves would dry quickly enough and not be blown away. 

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Stevia Life Sweeteners exited Kenya for Rwanda after it was wooed by the government looking to diversify its exports. There it has gone on to set up a drying facility meaning farmers just harvest the crop and have it picked from farms raw. It is then dried and processed.

Having lost millions trying to get stevia farming off the ground in Kenya, and shortly after this failed second stab, PureCircle closed down its Kericho offices in 2016 and exited the Kenya market.

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