Agricultural commercialisation in Meru County, Kenya: What are the policy implications?

Abstract

Kenya’s highlands have a long history of agricultural commercialisation, from colonial times to the present. Policies from 1895 to the 1930s were aimed primarily at developing European settler agriculture, which formed the backbone of Kenya’s colonial economy. The first major land reform took place on the eve of Kenya’s independence in the mid-1950s. Famously known as the Swynnerton Plan, this colonial agricultural policy intended to create an African middle class of commercial farmers through land consolidation that would pioneer an agrarian transformation based on cash-crop agriculture.