Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe announced on Friday that the Kenyan government has set a new floor price of Ksh 5,100 per 90-kilogram bag of wheat, a move designed to boost farmer incomes and secure a stable domestic supply before any imports are allowed into the market.
The new price emerged from consultations coordinated by the Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA), bringing together the Cereal Growers Association, wheat farmers, and cereal millers. It applies at designated aggregation centres, where the government has already started purchasing locally produced wheat.
This season’s harvest tells a sobering story. Approximately one million 90-kilogram bags are expected — a sharp drop from the 1.7 million bags produced last year. The ministry points directly to two culprits: destructive weather conditions and a mass shift by farmers toward barley, which fetched around Ksh 5,300 per bag last season and made wheat look like a losing bet.
That calculation has now flipped. Barley prices have collapsed to between Ksh 4,200 and Ksh 4,500 per bag, making the newly priced wheat a far more attractive option for growers heading into the next planting cycle. The government is betting that the Ksh 5,100 price signal will pull farmers back.
More than 2,000 wheat farmers across Narok, Nakuru, Meru, Laikipia, Nyandarua, and Uasin Gishu stand to benefit directly from the revised price. These are the communities that feed Kenya’s flour mills — and by extension, the millions of Kenyans for whom ugali and chapati are daily staples.
The government’s ambitions stretch well beyond this single season. The ministry outlined a package of structural interventions aimed at reducing Kenya’s costly dependence on imported wheat:
Despite these plans, growth projections have already been revised downward. Wheat production is now expected to grow by roughly five per cent this season — half the earlier forecast of ten per cent — with adverse weather cited as the primary drag on output.
The government insists the pricing agreement strikes the right balance: better returns for farmers without pushing the cost of bread and flour out of reach for ordinary consumers. Whether that balance holds will depend on how quickly local production can scale — and how reliably Kenyan farmers can trust that the price floor won’t shift beneath their feet before the next harvest.
