Growing Cotton (“White Gold”) Outweighs Selling of Second Hand Clothes

The debate on whether we should revive cotton farming, or continue importing second hand clothes is healthy, but it needs to be fact-based.

According to estimates, growing and processing cotton (a.k.a “white gold”) has the potential to create 700,000 new direct and indirect jobs from value addition and this should not come as a surprise.

When a country imports second hand clothes, it exports jobs that would have been created from selling raw cotton, lint cotton (after ginning), in spinning, weaving, printing and tailoring. This scenario applies to virtually all products such as coffee, tea, oilseeds (soybeans, maize, ?sunflower) and minerals such as copper and gold.

Value addition

For example, if a kilogram of ginned cotton sells at $1.37, when it’s turned into yarn, the price is $3. When woven into fabric, it sells at $5. The final garment that you and me proudly wear to office or church every Sunday sells between $8-10, up from the initial cost $1.37 for a kilo of ginned lint cotton (see graph below). ?

Those of us who have been around for some time now will recall that in the 1970s, cotton was the second biggest employer in Kenya after the public service. In India, Pakistan, China, United States and Brazil (the world’s top producers of cotton), the crop is one of the key drivers of economic growth due to the high demand of the fabric to make clothes for the growing population across the world.

Export Processing Zones

Although Kenya is one of the beneficiaries to the duty-free U.S market known as AGOA, which attained an estimated export value of Sh 50 billion in 2020 according to data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, most of fabric used to manufacture the clothes at the various export processing zones is imported, denying rural economies billions of shillings.

The problem is that there is not enough cotton grown in Kenya to meet demand for making the fabrics and, yet, the crop doesn’t require a lot of rainfall and it can grow in virtually most parts of Kenya— Mt. Kenya, lower Eastern, Western, Coast and Nyanza regions.

When the cotton industry in Kenya collapsed in 1985, the country was producing 70,000 bales per year but this has since dropped to a mere 28,000 bales. Experts attribute this drop to the World Bank and IMF-induced reforms which liberalised agriculture, paving way for the importation of second hand clothes. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Kenyans lost their jobs.

Bt Cotton Variety

The new Bt cotton variety— genetically modified seed improved with Bacillus thuringiensis, or BT gene, to provide inherent resistance to a damaging caterpillar pest popularly known as African bollworm— requires minimal rainfall to grow, matures faster and produces more yield per acreage of land. The inbuilt pesticide in the form of proteins found in Bt cotton kills insects when they try to eat the plant, minimising chances of loss of the crop due to the caterpillar-like pests.

The African bollworm has been unanimously identified as the biggest headache for cotton farmers. In Africa, South Africa, Eswatini, Malawi, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Sudan have already adapted the Bt cotton for the commercial cultivation. Kenya imposed a ban on GMO crops and products in 2012.

Research done locally has shown that Bt Cotton yields four times more than conventional varieties and it takes 130 to 180 days to mature. A local farmer growing the traditional and the Bt varieties can harvest 1.5 and 6.2 tonnes of the crop per hectare of land respectively, according to a study by the Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation.

It goes without saying that the “white gold” is definitely one answer to Kenya’s economic growth and job creation strategy.?

Dr Subiri Obwogo is a medical doctor, specialist in public health medicine and independent consultant in health policy and systems strengthening. He’s also the author of two books and several publications.