The Food Import Question

Kenya’s food import bill has been climbing steadily. Food and beverage imports hit a record Sh81.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 40.9% from the same period the previous year, while rice overtook wheat as the country’s costliest cereal import in 2025, at Sh55.11 billion against Sh41.73 billion for wheat. Add sugar, edible oils and maize brought in to cover seasonal shortfalls, and the annual bill sits close to Sh300 billion. This is not incidental to Kenya’s agricultural policy. It is the policy’s consequence.

A country producing more than a fifth of its GDP from agriculture, employing 40% of its workforce in farming and feeding two-thirds of its households through rural livelihoods should not need to import food at this scale. Kenya does, and the reason is not drought, war or market volatility alone. Kenya has built a budget system which starves the infrastructure needed to close the import gap while pouring money into short-term interventions which cannot close it. Understanding how this happened means looking not just at what Kenya allocates to agriculture, but how it allocates within an already constrained budget, and why policymakers keep repeating the same pattern.

A Budget Stretched Thin

Kenya’s 2026/27 national budget runs to about Sh4.8 trillion, and direct programme allocations to agriculture and food systems stand at Sh64 billion, roughly 1.3% of total spending. Even on the broader definition used by the Ministry, Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe told Parliament in February 2026 the sector had been allocated Sh75.49 billion under the Budget Policy Statement, just 2.7% of the national budget, and pushed lawmakers to raise it toward 5%, roughly Sh140 billion. Either way, the sector’s real purchasing power keeps shrinking against inflation and the rising cost of climate adaptation. This underfunding alone is a problem. It is not the core problem, though.

What the Money Actually Buys

Within agriculture’s constrained allocation, spending is distributed in a way which all but guarantees the import bill stays high. Of the Sh64 billion in direct programme funding for 2026/27, fertiliser subsidies take the largest share at Sh18 billion, close to 28% of the total. Seed subsidies receive Sh2 billion and coffee seedlings Sh1 billion, a combined 4.7%. Programmes aimed at longer-term transformation fare a little better on paper: the National Agricultural Value Chain Development Project gets Sh4.7 billion and the Food Systems Resilience Project Sh5.4 billion, together just over 15% of the allocation.

The most damaging cuts sit outside the visible programme lines, in the foundation underneath them. Funding for agricultural extension services has stagnated for years, leaving Kenya with one extension officer for roughly every 1,093 farm households, according to UN figures, against the FAO’s recommended ratio of one to 400. Irrigation infrastructure languishes. Research capacity withers. Storage facilities deteriorate. This is the core misallocation, and it explains the import bill more directly than any single drought or price shock.

The Cost of an Absent Extension Officer

Underfunded extension carries consequences which accumulate quietly across millions of farms. Without access to a trained extension officer, a farmer cannot easily learn which climate-smart practices suit a changing season, stays exposed to counterfeit inputs, and keeps planting varieties bred for yesterday’s rainfall pattern rather than today’s. Agronomic assessments put the resulting yield gap as high as 40% in the worst-affected areas, though the precise figure varies by crop and region and would benefit from closer verification against primary research.

These losses show up on the ground long before they show up in a national statistic. They are the difference between a harvest which feeds a household through the season and one which runs out early. They push farmers onto credit they cannot repay and keep rural incomes flat even as input costs climb. And they are a direct contributor to a food import bill approaching Sh300 billion a year.

Redirecting even a fraction of the current fertiliser subsidy budget into extension and irrigation could meaningfully narrow this dependence over several years. Translating this into precise production gains would need crop-specific and region-specific modelling beyond the scope of this piece, but the direction is clear enough: Kenya is spending billions on imports to avoid spending millions on extension officers.

When Good Intentions Meet Weak Execution

The misallocation problem is compounded by a second failure: poor execution of the money already committed. The State Department for Agriculture has repeatedly closed the financial year with development budget absorption rates below 70%, slowed by procurement delays and administrative bottlenecks. On the ground, this shows up as farmers registering for e-voucher input schemes ahead of the planting window, only to receive redemption notices after the rains have already fallen, turning a well-intentioned subsidy into a sunk cost.

The Auditor-General’s report on the State Department for Agriculture flagged Sh5.252 billion in pending bills tied to maize and fertiliser subsidy programmes, some unpaid since the 2017/2018 financial year, prompting Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to open a fresh probe in 2026. This followed an earlier Public Accounts Committee order for a forensic audit of a separate Sh15 billion fertiliser subsidy programme over allegations of pricing irregularities and distribution leakages. Procurement stretches across months. Distribution systems fail. Money allocated on paper never reaches the farmer it was meant for.

Why the Pattern Keeps Repeating

Understanding why this pattern of misallocation persists means looking past the budget documents to the incentives facing policymakers. A subsidised bag of fertiliser delivered before planting season is visible and immediate: a farmer can trace the benefit directly to government action within a single electoral cycle. Extension services, irrigation schemes and research investments pay off over years, their benefits spread thin and rarely credited to any one administration.

Kenya’s fertiliser subsidy design has been revised repeatedly around election periods, consistent with its high political visibility relative to slower-moving infrastructure spend. This asymmetry, concentrated and immediate political credit for subsidies against diffuse and long-term credit for infrastructure, helps explain why the allocation pattern holds even as its cost to productivity accumulates. The irony cuts deep: by chasing short-term political wins, policymakers guarantee the long-term productivity crisis which forces them to keep funding subsidies in the next electoral cycle. The fertiliser subsidy becomes a substitute for solving the problem rather than a step toward solving it, and the import bill keeps growing.

Why Banks Won’t Lend to Farmers

The misallocation problem radiates outward and suppresses private investment across the sector. Banks, impact investors and agri-processors build their credit models around the presence of public goods: functional feeder roads, reliable irrigation, active extension services. When development spending gets squeezed in favour of recurrent costs or politically visible subsidies, the sector’s risk profile stays stubbornly high.

Central Bank of Kenya data shows agriculture receives less than five percent of total commercial bank lending, even though the sector contributes more than a fifth of GDP, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa puts the continent-wide agricultural financing gap at $65 billion. Without the foundational public investment needed to de-risk the sector, commercial interest rates stay prohibitively high, and private capital keeps flowing toward safer sectors instead. Farmers are left with fewer financing options and higher costs, and the budget’s failure to fund extension does not just reduce yields on existing farms. It blocks the emergence of new, commercially viable agricultural enterprises which could multiply every shilling of public spending several times over.

Private-Sector Voices Pushing Back

This is not a debate confined to Treasury officials and parliamentary committees. The private sector has organised around it directly. The Agriculture Sector Network (ASNET), the umbrella body coordinating agriculture actors across Kenya under the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, launched a Budget Advocacy Initiative with support from GIZ, consolidating private sector priorities and pushing for policy reform. Its members, ranging from farmer cooperatives to agri-input manufacturers, made the case directly to government: cess harmonisation, financing access and extension capacity matter more to long-term competitiveness than another round of subsidy.

Public finance practitioners have made similar arguments through the participatory budgeting process itself. Expertise Global, working with the Center for International Private Enterprise, convened a private sector roundtable ahead of the 2024 Finance Bill and presented recommendations to the National Assembly’s Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning, highlighting how budget decisions affecting agriculture and other productive sectors ripple through to SMEs and entrepreneurs. Both efforts point to the same conclusion this piece argues for: better budget architecture, not louder subsidy politics, is what will move the needle.

Three Reforms for FY 2027/28

Increasing allocations without fixing prioritisation and execution will not transform the sector. Three changes should anchor the FY 2027/28 budget cycle.

First, reallocate within the existing envelope. Rather than committing 28% of direct agriculture spending to fertiliser subsidies, Treasury should move toward a mix closer to 35% for extension services and farmer training, 25% for irrigation and storage infrastructure, 20% for research and value chains, 15% for targeted input support and 5% for credit facilitation. This shifts emphasis from short-term relief to durable productive capacity, and it mirrors the allocation structure of countries which have closed their own import gaps.

Second, fix execution alongside allocation. Parliament should legislate a 90-day procurement fast-track for agricultural inputs tied to the planting calendar. Treasury should publish quarterly absorption-rate data for the State Department for Agriculture, so under-execution becomes visible before it compounds across a full financial year. Persistent execution failures should trigger mandatory mid-year reviews and the authority to reallocate funds to better-performing institutions.

Third, set a floor and a deadline. These reforms belong in the FY 2027/28 Budget Policy Statement, with agriculture’s budget share rising incrementally toward the 10% target set under the African Union’s Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme, commonly referenced through the Malabo Declaration, a benchmark Kenya’s allocation has swung well below for years, between 1.3% and 3.0%. By FY 2030/31, agriculture should receive not less than 10% of the national budget, with 60% going to development expenditure and at least 35% of development funds directed to extension, irrigation and research.

From Import Dependence to Food Security

Kenya’s food import bill is a policy choice. The country imports food. It has the land, labour and knowledge to grow, because the budget, year after year, keeps favouring what is politically visible over what is economically transformative.

Reversing this needs more than rhetoric about agriculture’s importance. It needs the discipline to move money from subsidies to extension, to fix procurement systems even when doing so is politically inconvenient, and to hold a multi-year timetable even as electoral cycles tempt policymakers toward short-term gestures. If Kenya wants food security, rural jobs and stronger growth, agriculture has to be funded and managed as a genuine development priority rather than an afterthought or an election-season talking point.

The Sh300 billion import bill is the price of doing otherwise.

Written by Jedidah Wanjagi– Programme Manager, Expertise Global