By Wangari Mwangi and Hellen Ndirangu
Families in Nyeri are being forced to dig deeper into their pockets to afford fresh produce as prices of the commodities continue to rise.
A spot check by KNA has revealed that the price of onions and carrots has been on a steady increase with traders attributing the price hikes to a shortage of the commodities at the farms.
For instance, a kilogram of carrots is currently retailing at between Sh120 and Sh150 per kilogram. This is a 100 percent price increase in less than two weeks when a kilogram was being sold at Sh 50 per kilogram.
It is not just carrots that are slowly disappearing from the market but the crisis has also affected the availability of onions. Currently, a kilogram of onions is selling at Sh100 per kilogram, up from Sh40.
Traders in the Nyeri open-air market say the price hikes are due to the scarcity of carrots on farms. They say that the local farmers who supply the commodity to them have attributed the scarcity to the delayed planting season which has in turn affected the maturity and harvesting period of the food commodity.
“The rains started just a few months back so the carrots that were planted have not reached the harvesting stage hence the shortage. In the previous years we used to get four to five delivery trucks a day but this year especially in the past four months the number reduced to now one or two trucks a day,” said Samuel Mutheki, a large-scale trader in the Nyeri open-air market.
Margaret Muriuki, an onion farmer and trader said that the shortage has been caused by low profits that were fetched last season when the market was flooded with onions. She said that successive onion glut which has seen many farmers incur huge losses has also led the farmers to opt out of growing onions this season.
“Since in the last season, we did not get good money from planting onions, only a handful of us planted onions after the last harvest season. Additionally, those that decided to grow onions only did so recently so they are not ready for harvesting. Because of these changes, the prices are expected to go higher than Sh100 a kilo until the next harvest season,” she said.
However, the price of green peas and potatoes has started to decrease. Currently, the price of one kilogram of green peas is being sold at Sh 70 from Sh250 last month and the price of a 17-kilogram bucket of potatoes is selling at Sh 700 from Sh 1500 last month.
Duncan Warutumo, a potato trader, stated that the prices of potatoes are even expected to go as low as Sh500 for the 17-kilogram bucket given that it is harvest time for many potato farmers.
“We hope that if farmers who had planted potatoes during the rainy season get more produce it will increase our supply, from 10 bags a day back to 17 bags a day, then automatically our prices will reduce,” he explained.
He added that the price of green peas has reduced since most farmers after noting how good the income from the last harvesting season last year was high, the majority of them ventured into planting peas increasing the supply of peas in the market. He explained that since the peas are in surplus and get spoiled fast when stored, it leaves them no choice but to sell them at a lower price.