Kenya’s macadamia crisis: 30,000 tonnes unsold as export window fails farmers

A government-authorised export initiative shipped just a fraction of its target, leaving smallholder macadamia farmers across eight counties counting the cost of a market failure years in the making.

By Collins Kibet

More than 30,000 metric tonnes of raw macadamia nuts are sitting unsold on farms and in storage facilities across Kenya, after a government-authorised export window closed last month having delivered results that fell dramatically short of expectations. The development has reignited serious questions about agricultural policy, market access and the government’s ability to protect the smallholder farmers who depend on the crop for their livelihoods.

The export window, which ran from July to October 2026, was designed to open international markets, ease a growing domestic surplus and improve the prices farmers received for their harvest. The results were sobering. When the window closed on 10 October, only 700 metric tonnes had been shipped against an anticipated 14,000 metric tonnes — a delivery rate of five per cent. The remaining produce, much of it already harvested and awaiting buyers, is now stranded in warehouses and on farms, leaving farmers and agricultural investors facing an uncertain financial outlook heading into the final months of the year.

The affected farming communities are spread across some of Kenya’s most productive agricultural counties — Murang’a, Nyeri, Embu, Meru, Kirinyaga, Uasin Gishu, Baringo and Taita Taveta. In many of these households, macadamia farming is not a side venture. It is the primary or supplementary source of income that pays school fees, services loans and keeps families afloat between seasons. For those farmers, the current surplus is not an abstract market statistic. It is a harvest they tended, invested in and cannot sell.

The situation exposes a structural vulnerability that agricultural experts and farmer representatives have flagged for years: production in Kenya’s macadamia sector has grown, but the market infrastructure, processing capacity and regulatory framework have not kept pace. When output increases without a corresponding expansion of reliable buyers and processing facilities, the burden falls almost entirely on farmers, who have the least power to absorb the shock.

Kenya Macadamia Growers Association Vice-Chairman Mureithi Gichabi has called for an urgent extension of the export window to allow exporters to fulfil existing contractual obligations that could not be completed before the October deadline. Gichabi has also raised serious concerns about the difficulties exporters experienced in completing the required inspection procedures — a bureaucratic bottleneck that, in the view of many in the industry, contributed significantly to the poor uptake during the window’s operational period.

The temporary export authorisation had been seen, when it was announced, as a practical response to a well-documented surplus that local processors could not absorb on their own. The macadamia processing industry in Kenya, though growing, does not yet have the capacity to handle the volumes that a good harvest produces, making export access not a luxury but a necessity for market stability. When that access is restricted, timed poorly or undermined by procedural obstacles, it is the farmer at the bottom of the value chain who pays the price.

The broader concern is one of policy consistency and trust. Farmers who invested in macadamia cultivation did so partly on the basis of expectations about market access and government support. Repeated disruptions — whether through abrupt window closures, inspection delays or shifting regulatory positions — erode that trust and discourage the kind of long-term agricultural investment that Kenya needs if it is to build a resilient and productive farming sector.

For the government, the macadamia surplus presents both an immediate challenge and a longer-term policy test. In the short term, an extension of the export window, combined with a streamlined inspection process, would provide meaningful relief to farmers and exporters with outstanding contractual commitments. Over the medium term, Kenya needs a more coherent and stable macadamia sector strategy — one that aligns production support with market development, processing investment and regulatory predictability.

As thousands of tonnes of produce continue to sit in storage, the cost of inaction is rising daily. Macadamia nuts have a shelf life, and so does farmer patience. The government’s response in the coming weeks will say a great deal about whose interests agricultural policy in Kenya is ultimately designed to serve.

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