Cotton Revival: Government Sets KES 72/kg Minimum Price, With Kitui Among the Growing Counties

The national government has set a new minimum farm-gate price of KES 72 per kilogram for seed cotton, up from KES 52 per kilogram previously, as part of a wider push to revive Kenya’s cotton and textile industry. Kitui is named among the counties where cotton is currently grown under this pricing framework, placing it alongside other Eastern and Nyanza counties in a sector the government has explicitly flagged for a policy-driven turnaround rather than leaving it to market forces alone.

Cotton was once a genuinely significant cash crop across parts of Eastern Kenya, with a functioning value chain running from smallholder farms through local ginneries to a domestic textile industry that, in an earlier era, was large enough to clothe a meaningful share of the country. Huduma Global’s account traces how that decline set in from the 1990s onward, undercut on one side by cheaper imported textiles – including the well-documented flood of secondhand clothing (mitumba) that reshaped Kenya’s retail clothing market – and on the other by an ageing, under-invested local ginning industry that struggled to offer farmers a price competitive with alternative crops. Cotton acreage across the country shrank accordingly, and with it, the rural income it used to generate.

A higher guaranteed minimum price is intended to make growing cotton commercially worthwhile again for smallholder farmers in semi-arid counties like Kitui, where the crop is genuinely well suited to the climate – cotton tolerates dry conditions reasonably well – but has struggled in recent years to compete for farmer attention against better-marketed, faster-turnaround crops like green grams, which now carry their own county-level price guarantee in Kitui specifically. A farmer choosing between the two isn’t just weighing per-kilogram price; cotton has a longer growing cycle and requires functioning ginning infrastructure nearby to be worth planting at scale at all, whereas green grams can be sold in relatively raw form through a much simpler local market.

Whether the price increase actually shifts planting decisions on the ground will depend on factors well beyond the price itself: how consistently the KES 72/kg minimum is enforced at actual buying points (a guaranteed price that goes unenforced at the point of sale is not much of a guarantee), and whether ginning and onward marketing infrastructure is rebuilt fast enough to give farmers confidence that a cotton harvest will actually find a functioning buyer rather than sitting unsold. Neither of those is something a price policy alone can guarantee – they require sustained investment in the physical infrastructure the sector lost over three decades of decline, not just a revised number on a government notice.

For Kitui specifically, cotton’s fortunes will likely track how the county’s own agricultural strategy balances competing priorities: green grams already have a county-backed guaranteed price and a simpler path to market, and any real cotton revival will need to demonstrate a genuinely competitive return before it reclaims meaningful acreage from a crop farmers already have good, recent reasons to trust. A revived cotton sector would also need buyers to actually show up consistently at harvest time, season after season, before a farmer weighing next year’s planting decision treats the new minimum price as dependable rather than a one-off policy announcement that might not survive a change in government priorities.

Want to read more about this? Huduma Global's cotton piece.