Burness Global: Stories

Kenya Cows (credit: Dominic Chavez)

NAIROBI – The pace of life here is as it always has been–lots of traffic jams, crowded downtown sidewalks, tens of thousands of people selling things by the roadside. Tourists also have returned in high numbers this summer. It is easy to forget that just seven months ago the waves of post-election violence raised serious questions about the country’s future.

But the impacts linger, just out of view. This morning, I was interviewing Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board, and he brought up how the violence affected the dairy industry.

Much of the violence, he noted, was concentrated in the Rift Valley, which produces roughly half of the country’s milk. During the month-long upheaval, “farmers’ animals were stolen, infrastructure was destroyed, and people just scattered.”

In December 2007, just before the violent outbreak, the country was producing 1.2 million liters of milk per day. But during the violence–January and February–output dropped by half, to 600,000 liters per day. Now, Gichohi said, it had rebounded to 850,000 liters daily.

It is the cold season here, and dairy cows are producing less milk than during warmer times. So it seemed that the dairy industry was making a fairly swift rebound, and that in a few months it was conceivable to approach the pre-violence numbers.

But Gichohi said it wouldn’t be so easy.

“It will take us one to two years to get back to where it was,” he said. “As our prime minister said in London, ‘Kenyans have gone to hell and we don’t want to go back.’ That’s how we feel. We hope those crazy days don’t come back.”