By Anthony Muchoki | December 2025

I. The Theatre of Abundance

There is a peculiar theatre playing out across the savannahs and highlands of East Africa—a tragicomedy in which the actors construct magnificent stages only to sabotage their own performances. In 2024, Tanzania harvested over eleven million tonnes of maize, ascending to become Africa’s third-largest producer, a feat that would have seemed fantastical merely a decade ago. Kenya’s sugar sector, once a skeletal relic of mismanagement and cheap imports, staged a phoenix-like resurrection, slashing foreign sugar purchases by forty-five percent. Uganda’s dairy cows produced a staggering 5.4 billion litres of milk, enough to drown the region’s protein deficits in creamy abundance. Rwanda, that diminutive laboratory of ambition, has turned fish ponds and pyrethrum fields into precision instruments of export earnings.

The numbers are intoxicating. Ethiopia has broken ground on a $2.5 billion fertilizer plant in Gode that promises to sever the country’s umbilical cord to imported nutrients forever. Standard Gauge Railway lines are being stitched across borders like sutures on a healing wound. Digital platforms have registered six million Kenyan farmers for e-voucher subsidies. Hello Tractor’s mechanization network now services 2.5 million smallholders who once knew only the hoe and the hand plough. Carbon markets are putting cash into pockets that never before held anything but seeds and hope.

And yet.

The conjunction hangs in the air like the silence between lightning and thunder. For in this same theatre of agricultural triumph, the actors have developed an extraordinary talent for self-sabotage—a virtuosity in constructing barriers with the same hands that harvest bounty.

II. The Milk Wars and Other Border Follies

Consider the absurdist drama of the Kenya-Uganda dairy trade. Uganda produces milk at sixty percent of Kenya’s cost—a competitive advantage as natural as the verdant pastures that make it possible. When a Ugandan cow transforms grass into protein, it does so at labour rates and feed costs that Kenyan farmers, trapped in an oligopolistic feed market dominated by four companies, can only dream of. Logic would suggest a simple choreography: Ugandan surplus flows south, Kenyan processors add value, consumers across both nations benefit from affordable nutrition.

Instead, we have erected invisible tollbooths of paperwork and permits. In 2024, Kenya restricted import permits for Ugandan dairy products, ostensibly to protect domestic farmers but effectively condemning Ugandan processors to scout markets as far as Algeria—a geographical absurdity that adds carbon miles and subtracts regional coherence. Brookside Uganda, blocked at the Kenyan border, now ships powdered milk across the Mediterranean while East African children queue for expensive local alternatives.

“We preach continental free trade under AfCFTA, then retreat into national bunkers at the first sign of surplus or shortage.”

The milk wars are merely one act in this theatre of regional dysfunction. Tanzania, the newly crowned granary of the region, periodically slaps export bans on maize just when neighbours most desperately need it. The same government that has invested billions in irrigation infrastructure and fertilizer subsidies—transforming the country into Africa’s third-largest maize producer—occasionally forgets that food security is a regional equation, not a national fortress. When Tanzania’s silos overflow while Kenyan and Ugandan markets starve, the African Continental Free Trade Area begins to resemble less a continental vision and more a continental fiction.

III. The Counterfeit Harvest

If border politics represent the external sabotage of agricultural progress, the counterfeit seed crisis represents the internal rot. In Uganda, studies suggest that thirty to forty percent of seeds circulating in markets are fake—packets of hope that will germinate into nothing but disappointment and debt. A farmer who purchases what he believes to be improved maize variety receives instead a bag of grain masquerading as seed, genetically indistinguishable from what he could have saved from his own harvest but sold at premium prices.

The mathematics of this deception are devastating. When nearly half of all seeds are fraudulent, yields collapse before the first rain falls. Extension workers preach the gospel of improved varieties while charlatans hawk salvation in counterfeit packaging. The farmer, unable to distinguish saint from swindler, eventually loses faith in the entire enterprise of agricultural modernization. Trust—that invisible currency more valuable than any fertilizer subsidy—erodes with each failed germination.

Ethiopia’s seed sector, meanwhile, has been strangled by a different pathology: regulatory constipation. For years, a state monopoly controlled seed quality, creating bottlenecks that starved farmers of the Early Generation Seed essential for multiplication and distribution. The new Seed Proclamation of 2023 promises liberalization, allowing private companies to participate in quality control and marketing. But proclamations, however well-intentioned, do not automatically translate into functioning markets. The gap between policy and implementation remains a chasm into which agricultural potential continues to fall.

IV. The Feed Trap and the Hollowing of Value Chains

Kenya’s poultry sector presents perhaps the starkest illustration of how success in one domain can mask structural failure in another. The country has achieved remarkable progress in egg production, with modern layer operations dotting the peri-urban landscapes of Kiambu and Nakuru. Yet beneath this apparent prosperity lies a crisis: feed costs consume sixty to seventy percent of production expenses, and a 2024 inquiry by the Competition Authority revealed that the animal feed market operates as an oligopoly, with four companies exercising pricing power that squeezes farmers from both ends.

The contrast with Tanzania is instructive. There, bumper harvests of maize and sunflower have lowered feed costs, enabling poultry producers to expand production and even export eggs and day-old chicks to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. What Kenya imports at premium prices, Tanzania produces in abundance. The difference is not climate or genetics but policy architecture—a reminder that agricultural competitiveness is manufactured as much as it is grown.

Meanwhile, Kenya’s dairy farmers face a similar squeeze. The average cost of producing a litre of milk reached 36.2 Kenyan shillings in 2024, rising to 44.1 shillings for zero-grazing systems dependent on purchased fodder. These figures represent not merely economic data but the daily calculus of survival for thousands of smallholders caught between rising input costs and stagnant farmgate prices. When production costs exceed what processors are willing to pay, the result is not merely economic loss but the slow hollowing of entire value chains.

V. The Climate Whiplash

As if the self-inflicted wounds of policy dysfunction and market failure were insufficient, East Africa now contends with a climate that has become actively hostile. The period from 2020 to 2023 delivered the worst drought in forty years, decimating livestock herds across the pastoral belt that stretches from southern Ethiopia through northern Kenya into Somalia. Pastoralists who had survived decades of cyclical dry spells found themselves in uncharted territory—multiple consecutive failed rainy seasons that depleted not just water sources but the very resilience of communities adapted to aridity.

Then came the El Niño floods of early 2024, arriving with a cruelty that seemed almost personal. Livestock that had survived the drought drowned. Water infrastructure painstakingly constructed was washed away. Farmers who had planted in anticipation of the rains watched their fields transform into lakes. The whiplash—from drought to deluge and back again—has become the new normal, a climatic volatility that renders traditional coping mechanisms obsolete.

As this essay is written, forecasters predict a La Niña event for early 2025, promising a return to drought conditions mere months after the floods receded. This is not the stable climate against which agricultural systems evolved over millennia. This is something new: a perpetual state of emergency that demands adaptive capacity most smallholders simply do not possess.

“Climate will not wait for our politics. La Niña is already at the door, threatening drought just months after El Niño’s floods receded.”

VI. The Infrastructure of Promise

Against this backdrop of challenge and self-sabotage, infrastructure projects continue their slow march toward completion. Tanzania’s electric Standard Gauge Railway from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma began operations in mid-2024, offering a strategic threat to Kenya’s Northern Corridor and a lifeline to landlocked Rwanda and Burundi. Uganda, after a decade of delays that had become almost folkloric, finally signed a construction contract with Turkish firm Yapi Merkezi to build the Malaba-Kampala SGR leg.

The port competition between Mombasa and Dar es Salaam has unleashed efficiency gains that are quietly revolutionary. Ship turnaround times have fallen; container handling has improved; the cost of moving agricultural bulk from farm to port is declining. Cold chain investments are multiplying—the Kenyan cold logistics market is projected to reach $3.39 billion by 2025. Ethiopia’s Integrated Agro-Industrial Parks in Bure, Bulbula, and Yirgalem are now operational, attracting investors in edible oil refining, avocado processing, and dairy.

These are genuine achievements, the patient work of planners and builders who understand that development is measured in decades, not news cycles. Yet infrastructure alone cannot overcome the trust deficit that plagues regional trade. Railways that connect nations politically committed to disconnection serve primarily as monuments to unrealized potential.

VII. The Digital Leapfrog That Almost Was

East Africa was supposed to be the proving ground for agricultural technology’s transformative promise. Mobile money would bank the unbanked. E-vouchers would deliver subsidies without leakage. Platform cooperatives would connect smallholders directly to markets, bypassing exploitative middlemen. The narrative was seductive: Africa would leapfrog the industrial agricultural model that degraded soils and concentrated wealth in the Global North, arriving directly at a digitally-enabled, smallholder-centric future.

Reality has proven more complicated. Kenya’s e-voucher system has indeed registered 6.58 million farmers, a genuine achievement in targeting and delivery. But studies indicate that the program has ‘crowded out’ private sector retailers, disrupting the commercial distribution networks that once served rural areas. When government subsidies dominate the market, private investment retreats, and when subsidies eventually end—as they always do—farmers may find themselves worse served than before.

The AgTech sector itself is undergoing a painful maturation. Twiga Foods, the Kenyan B2B darling that had achieved unicorn status, paused Nairobi operations in late 2024 to restructure its logistics and reduce cash burn. The pivot from growth-at-all-costs to unit economics signals a market correction that will leave casualties. Meanwhile, the ‘first mile’ problem persists: getting inputs and information to the most remote farmers remains expensive, unreliable, and often corrupt.

VIII. The Sovereignty Trap

Beneath the specific policy failures and market dysfunctions lies a deeper tension: the contradiction between national food sovereignty and regional integration. Every government in East Africa has learned, through painful experience, that dependence on global markets for essential foods is a vulnerability. When grain ships are diverted by distant wars, when fertilizer prices spike due to sanctions on faraway nations, the calculus of food security becomes urgently local.

Tanzania’s strategic grain reserves, Kenya’s fertilizer subsidies, Ethiopia’s fertilizer manufacturing ambitions—all represent rational responses to the lesson that nations must be able to feed themselves. Yet sovereignty pursued in isolation becomes a prison. When every country hoards its surplus against hypothetical future shortages, actual present shortages go unaddressed. When borders close to protect domestic farmers, the farmers across those borders—equally deserving of protection—suffer.

The African Continental Free Trade Area promised a way out of this trap: continental integration that would provide the scale and diversity to weather regional shocks while respecting national interests. Five years after its launch, AfCFTA remains more aspiration than reality, its protocols elaborate but its implementation halting. The vision of seamless agricultural trade across fifty-four nations founders on the mundane realities of incompatible standards, unpredictable border closures, and the accumulated distrust of decades.

IX. The Case for Putting Down the Gloves

What would it mean for East African agricultural players to finally put down their gloves? Not to abandon competition—markets thrive on competition—but to cease the self-defeating protectionism that impoverishes neighbours without enriching citizens. Not to surrender sovereignty, but to recognize that in an era of climate volatility and supply chain fragility, regional resilience is national security.

It would mean Tanzania allowing its maize surplus to flow freely to deficit neighbours, trusting that when drought strikes—as it inevitably will—those neighbours will reciprocate. It would mean Kenya opening its dairy market to Ugandan competition while investing in the feed sector reforms that would make its own farmers competitive. It would mean Uganda tackling the counterfeit seed menace with the seriousness it reserves for more glamorous crises. It would mean Ethiopia implementing its seed liberalization not just on paper but in practice.

Most fundamentally, it would mean recognizing that East African agriculture is not a zero-sum game. When Tanzanian farmers prosper by feeding Kenyan cities, Kenyan processors gain raw materials and Kenyan consumers gain affordable food. When Ugandan dairy finds markets in Rwanda, Rwandan nutrition improves and Ugandan farmers earn incomes they will spend on goods that circulate through regional economies. The growth of one country’s agricultural sector need not come at the expense of another’s; more often, it creates the demand and supply that lifts all boats.

X. The Window Is Closing

The window for building resilient, integrated regional food systems is not infinite. Climate change is accelerating, rendering the agricultural models of the past increasingly obsolete. Youth populations are exploding, creating demographic pressures that only productive employment—much of it necessarily in agriculture and agro-processing—can absorb. Global supply chains are fracturing along geopolitical fault lines, making regional self-sufficiency not merely desirable but essential.

The infrastructure is being laid. The technology exists. The farmers are ready. What remains is the hardest part—trust. Trust that open borders strengthen rather than weaken food security. Trust that fair prices for farmers mean sustainable supply chains. Trust that today’s surplus will not become tomorrow’s contraband.

The achievements of 2024 demonstrate what is possible. Eleven million tonnes of Tanzanian maize. Kenya’s sugar revival. Uganda’s dairy surge. Rwanda’s export precision. Ethiopia’s manufacturing ambitions. These are not accidents but the fruits of sustained investment, policy coherence, and institutional commitment. They prove that East African agriculture can compete globally, feed regionally, and prosper locally.

But to reach the next level—to transform these national achievements into regional resilience—the players must stop fouling each other. The milk wars must end. The export bans must cease. The counterfeit seeds must be eradicated. The regulatory barriers that protect no one while impoverishing everyone must fall.

XI. The Invitation

This is not a call for naïve optimism. The obstacles are real, the interests entrenched, the distrust accumulated over generations. National politicians who close borders may genuinely believe they are protecting their citizens; their error lies not in intent but in analysis. The path to regional integration will be neither straight nor smooth.

But the alternative—continued fragmentation in an era demanding integration—leads nowhere worth going. It leads to farmers producing surpluses that rot for want of markets while consumers across imaginary lines queue for expensive imports. It leads to infrastructure investments that connect nothing because policy disconnects everything. It leads to a region blessed with some of the world’s most productive agricultural potential remaining a net food importer indefinitely.

The field is set. The players are assembled. The question that hangs over East African agriculture in 2025 is not whether the region can achieve agricultural transformation—the evidence of recent years proves it can—but whether the players will finally put down their gloves and play together.

The granary is full. The ports are humming. The railways are running. Now it is time to open the gates.

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Anthony Muchoki is the publisher of Kilimokwanza.org and 100Africa.com. He writes from the intersection of code and verse, farm and forum.