Smallholder Coffee Farming In Nyeri District: Its Influence On Food Production

Abstract

It was hypothesized that cultivation of cash crops by smallholder farmers was likely to alter their food sufficiency positions from their farm production. The study centered on the theme of allocation of farm-level factors of production and how farmers strived to counter-balance them in pursuit of both market and subsistence production. The study also examined how agricultural policies tended to favour cash crop production. The study reflects the outcome of contradictions between traditional subsistence and modern market-oriented ideas about farming, superimposed on a social and economic structure that is ill equipped to take new developments. The imbalances emanating from the attempts to straddle between market and subsistence production reflect intricacies generated by everyday simple happenings in small holders' agriculture. They succumb to the pressure especially on land and labour, two very crucial facets of their economy. The minimal concentration on subsistence production affects the life of the farmer as a whole. The quantities of food production suffer at the hands of the market economy. Food deficiencies and unequal exchange eventually become prominent features of the« agriculture. The study's theoretical orientation focuses on the question of capitalist expansion and its effects on peasant modes of production. The trend of development through processes of market production has wrought adverse effects on peasant's subsistence production. Since their search for livelihoods in the changed situation must necessarily be within the context of exchange economy, it becomes essential to focus on how their agriculture is constrained by the ecology, hence utilization of the theory of intensification. Several recommendations are submitted as remedial measure in so far as correcting the imbalances registered in the production processes a re concerned. The recommendations underlie the need to approach rural development planning with a fuller knowledge of the potentials and internal dynamics of smallholder agriculture.