So what crop would you grow if you farmed in Kenya?

Editor—What would you do if you were a farmer near Kaare, a semi-arid area on the on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya?

It's a hard life being a subsistence farmer. The cost of living is high, with medical bills, school fees (only primary education is free), let alone everything else you need. On the way to Kaare I used to drive through shambas (cultivated areas) of maize, millet, sunflower, coffee, and tobacco. I saw the seasons change: the naked fields ready for the rains, the green shoots, the crops ripening, the dried maize stems standing in the fields after the harvest.

The two cash crops around Kaare are coffee and tobacco.

Coffee needs a lot of work: tending, feeding, pruning, spraying, and processing. Once, it was worth the effort. A colleague says her father put his eight children through school, and some through university, on the proceeds of coffee. You couldn't do that now—the price of coffee has fallen; lots of people thought it was a good crop so lots of people grew it so there is too much, and a lot of the money gets lost on its way to the farmer. The coffee societies are not giving their farmers money; they give them a credit note to take to the school or hospital, which might or might not be accepted in lieu of cash.

Tobacco is different. You take your crop to the factory, you get paid promptly—not a worthless piece of paper, but something you can cash, or pay into the bank and spend as you want, or even save. There are, of course, drawbacks. You need more land to earn the same amount, which means less to grow food with. You grow it, you smoke it. Your sons grow up and smoke it. You know that eventually there will be countless people with lung cancer. But if you had a family and were faced with the choice of coffee or tobacco what would you do?

I am amazed at the number of people who would never grow tobacco on principle and who continue to struggle with coffee or other small cash crops. In the rich north it is easy to have conferences, make symbolic gestures, take the companies to court; but unless those in the north help the likes of the small farmers I used to see, tobacco and all its ills are going to be around for a long time.