Crash in watermelon market leaves western farmers in the red

Even the chaste men find it hard to resist the urge for philandering in boom times.

In Western Kenya, a man who gets himself an additional wife in times of plenty is never chastised for being extravagant, he is celebrated for putting his windfall into good use.

So, I was not amused by my sister-in-law’s story of how one of the neighbors in the village, a middle-aged man, added another wife after a bumper harvest of watermelons.

What are watermelons

Until recently, the idea of farming this fruit would have seemed outlandish, here in Teso South, Busia County. Very few had seen it, let alone eaten it. 

Then a few years ago, it became the ticket out of rural poverty. The local governments and civil society peddled watermelon as an alternative for crop diversification while the fruit’s popularity grew into Kenyan homes as slices of blood purifiers and aphrodisiac seeds.

But the Melon Party seems to have ended no sooner than it started.

Now rural farmers are left to carry the weight of the collapse in the market for the bulbous green stripped fruit. And in this crashing red mess is analogous to cautionary tales on the dangers of finger-burning that lurk beneath every investment fad.  

Recently I returned to the village after a two-year hiatus, expecting very little, if any modification to the landscape. All my years there the world always remained intact. The distant sight of boulders rising as if they jostled against each other in their race for the skies was as breathtaking as ever.

Gin and watermelon

The splendor of the land has barely been scarred. This permanence only interrupted by the effort of men and beasts in trying to make a living amidst the soil that have fallen off the boulders over years of geographical transformations.  

The raucous chatter of the monkeys as they descended from the hills to feast on the maize, oblivious of my vigils, together with the thickets that housed these pesky hominids, have long disappeared into distant memory.

Tobacco plantations disappeared decades before Mastermind Tobacco, the main buyer of the stimulant in the '90s, went under.

What was left were homesteads oscillating between sugarcane, maize, cassava, sweet potatoes and those small rich-red peanuts that could be sold in shopping centres.

But then I noticed something new and exciting. Everywhere I turned I was met with watermelons. Where before I spotted school-going children eating sugarcane, they now had a piece of the fruit in their hands.

Even in homesteads where you least expected people to get fruity, like where we went to get a taste of the famed machozi ya simba, I was offered watermelon with the local gin. Watermelon was everywhere, not only on wooden carts and stalls, but everywhere.

I saw watermelons and their leftovers, half-eaten, strewn in almost every pathway. I was told even hogs had developed a taste for watermelon and that those who kept the pigs considered themselves lucky to supplement the diet of the insatiable beasts lest they have to watch the fruit rot in their farms.

Just what happened?

Not long ago, less than a year, when our man made his fortune and married another wife, a kilo of watermelon was going for Kes50. This felt like a fortune for western Kenya farmers struggling with sugarcane, a crop that took one and a half years to mature and was riddled with late payments and a legacy of poverty.

They say the decision of what to produce, when to produce, and why to produce, falls solely on the entrepreneur. But in most of Western Kenya, NGOs are deciding for the entrepreneurs.

The villagers were lured to the promise of this new cash crop, encouraged not only by local state officials but by civil society pushing sustainability projects in Western Kenya.

For years, most people in Western Kenya have not featured in the money economy because of the collapse of the sugar industry. This bred poverty and interventions by civil society. 

They pitched camp in Western Kenya ostensibly to help residents to solve every kind of problem, from fighting HIV/AIDS to eradicating poverty, and as part of their sustainability interventions encouraged families here to turn to watermelon farming.

Well suited for western soils

Farming watermelon, a fruit that traces its origins in the arid northeastern Africa, between Sudan and Egypt 5,000 years ago, was not such a bad idea, after all.  

Well-drained, sandy loam soils with a pH of between 6.0 and 6.8, such as the kind that can be found in Western Kenya, are ideal for watermelon cultivation. The fruit, although drought-resistant, and popular in the drier parts of Kenya like Wajir, can however do with Western Kenya’s adequate rains during flowering and fruiting stages.

Watermelon, unlike sugarcane, does not take long to mature. Within three months it was ready for harvesting, and the returns were also great.

The huge demand for watermelons in places such as Nairobi, Nakuru and Mombasa has given people in the drier parts of the country a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape poverty and improve their living standards. By farming this fruit, those who for long had been left out of the money economy unlike their peers in the highlands who grow tea and coffee, could cash in the dream of growing into an export market with potential to earn $4,400 an acre..

A quail success!

Watermelon was also being peddled as the new success story by the media with stories of lucrative farmers making a killing from new hybrids. In 2020, the Daily Nation ran a story about how a retired nurse minted Kes150,000 from a harvest of watermelon, Sukari F1 hybrid, which matured after 75 days. She said she sold a piece of watermelon at Kes30 and a kilo at between Kes300 and Kes350. Even sugarcane could not give you such returns.  

There were several rags-to-riches stories of how people in the drier parts of Kenya, from North Eastern through Ukambani to the Coast, were finally finding that elusive break from poverty.

The lure for this new fruit where others were minting money was irresistible for west Kenyan farmers. They decided to roll their sleeves and take a deep dive. Some did away with their sugarcane after the first harvest of the watermelons and expanded their acreage.

But they were not alone, the watermelon market boom has been growing slowly over the years and was always at a risk of deluge.

Nationally, 84,077 families grew watermelons by the end of August 2019 when the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) did its census. Most of these households were in Ukambani counties—Kitui, Machakos and Makueni.  

Kitui, where 17,724 households grew watermelons, had the highest tally.

Besides having the right climate conditions for growing watermelon, they are close to the markets of Nairobi, an advantage that is not enjoyed by the far-flung areas such as Teso South in Busia County.

Cartel territory

This means that most smallholder farmers in Busia, sell through brokers, Kenya’s industrialized cartels that have crippled entire market value chains over the years.

These brokers have been fleecing farmers for years circling like vultures over the collapse of maize and cotton farming in Western Kenya. The swoop down for astronomical margins at the expense of farmers who often have to sell way below production costs.

The brokers then move the produce through Kenya’s difficult infrastructure to markets in most urban centers, where there is a lucrative market for watermelon.

Demand and supply

No one knows when watermelon became popular. Suddenly, a lot of Nairobi people were falling in love with this summertime fruit, as those in the North Pole have christened it.

The popularity of watermelon in Kenya’s urban cities may boil down to its affordability. Water melon is sold by fruit vendors for as little as Kes20 for a razor thin strip of the red fruit. For hotels and wedding parties a few pieces will make the bulk of the salad plate while homes go for the fruit because kids love its succulent sweetness.

When my daughter was two years old, she relished watermelon and whenever we visited a grocery together, it was her fruit of choice. But as she grew older, she switched to apples.

I noticed the same trend in our office, people increasingly asked their salad to be brought with fewer, if any, watermelons. I don’t think it is the demand for watermelon that has gone down, but the supply has just been huge. And people were having enough of the watery fruit.

A watermelon bubble

This could only mean those who took a plunge into watermelon farming to feed into the demand in cities like Nairobi, the hub of consumerism, now had a perishable fruit they could not sell.

When I went back to the village, the air was thick with disillusionment. The watermelon boom had suddenly festered into a burst.

“Now, even getting Kes10 for a kilo of watermelon is difficult,” said my sister-in-law.   

One of the farmers, not very far from our home, is said to have been offered Kes5,000 for all his watermelons in the shamba, which he initially turned down.

He had spent more than Kes9,000 on the shamba, and despite the desolation, he was optimistic that he could salvage his production costs. He regretted it instead.

The next day when I passed by, three people were on the shamba harvesting the fruit, picking only the best and leaving the rest to either rot in the shamba, be fed to animals, or be given to children. He would be lucky if he gets Kes2,000, I was told. “And the traders are only picking the big ones and leaving the rest,” one of the neighbors told me.

Price takers

The harsh realities of the capital markets were being worked on the farmers as they watched their investment go down the drain.

I was told the farmer who turned down Kes5,000 from the trader had initially felt it was so little but soon became desperate as the fruit began deteriorating. What is more as the days went by, and marauders stole the fruit from the shamba at night, he was willing to climb down.

But by that time the only offer in the market was Kes3,000, from another trader and he accepted. Noting his desperation, the new buyer also disappeared and refused to pick his calls.

When he was finally out of options he was willing to throw his harvest away settling on the traders who offered him Kes2,000.

The watermelon craze has barely lasted three years. Is it a case of Johny come late?

“The traders tell us that there is an oversupply of watermelon in the market,” says one of the farmers, who only identifies himself as Joseph.

A failed experiment

The tales of misery resounded with me and how some of our people are unable to break out of the yoke of poverty. Each generation is broken down over the lure cash crops whose value chains are too disaggregated.

Dr Timothy Njagi, a research fellow at Egerton-affiliated Tegemeo Institute, a policy think-tank, blames it on what economists call information asymmetry, where one party in a transaction has information that the one does not.

Producers do not know, or cannot find, the market for their watermelon—and brokers making a kill out of this ignorance.

“The projects have introduced horticulture in non-traditional areas. However, they are yet to do market linkages,” said Njagi.

“The market 'doesn't know that they can get this produce at the production quality' so very few traders are getting there. This then creates a high supply-low demand scenario, resulting in very low farm gate prices. the traders in this case are making a killing,” added the agricultural economist.

He advises farmers to try and get the watermelon to Kisumu, Eldoret, or Nakuru.

“They will incur added costs but this will be worth their salt from the prices they get there,” he added.

Yet getting their products to such far-flung markets cannot be easy for these smallholders. They need to aggregate their produce to enjoy the economies of scale.

That would mean coalescing around cooperative societies, though Njagi insists they do not necessarily have to form cooperative societies.

“They just need to coordinate harvesting, then hire a lorry, take the produce to a city market, and everybody gets paid directly for what they deliver. This is how they are doing it in Central Kenya,” said Njagi.