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November 7, 2006; The Standard, Nairobi-Kenya
Grain Storage Pool Offers Food Security
Access full article in The Standard; Nairobi-Kenya
By Bob Wekesa
Western Province farmers have come up with a method to possibly attain food security. Known as ‘cereal banking’, farmers store cereals in a pool similar to savings in commercial banks.
"The cereal banks phenomenon operates on the principle that during harvest time, farmers have excess supply of cereals but a few months later, they are usually in the throes of starvation because they would have exhausted their stock by selling cheaply to middlemen", said Mr Patrick Nekesa, the Western Kenya manager of Resource Project Kenya, one of the three NGOs managing the initiative. The initiative targets middlemen who have been accused of exploiting farmers at harvest time.
"In the past, we sold maize to traders who would store it and resell to us a few weeks later at higher prices," says Ms Wifreida Muchete Lubanda, treasurer of Cheptulo Cereal Bank. Rockefeller Foundation provided the seed money for the ‘cereal banking’ project.
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