I recently accepted an invitation to visit Del Monte Kenya’s pineapple canning factory in Thika, to meet and engage the Managing Director, the South African National, Wayne Cook, who has recently assumed leadership of what ranks as the largest commercial farming enterprise in central Kenya.
I take a rather utopian view about factories and manufacturing plants in general. I enjoy watching machines and mortars twisting and turning, and fancy watching factory workers milling around conveyor belts, driving forklifts, and in the case of the Thika pineapple processing plant, making and packing slices and juices.
We don’t have too many factory plants in Kenya anymore. Over the years, manufacturing plants have been replaced by warehouses storing stuff imported from United Arab Emirates, Turkey and China.
A tour of the Del Monte Kenya’s processing plant is also an opportunity to apprise yourself and appreciate first-hand, just how important the company’s commercial farming operations are to the broader economy and heath of Thika town and indeed to the whole of the economy of the region.
We must remember that Thika town was initially conceived by Kenya’s immediate post- independent government as Nairobi’s satellite industrial town. In the 1960s and 70s, the town had a disproportionate share of manufacturing establishments compared to other towns in Kenya.
But in the last four or five decades, Thika town and indeed the central Kenya region, has experienced a de-industrialisation phenomenon that left behind an economically depressed landscape characterised by plant closures, job losses and socially disrupted communities.
Today, Del Monte Kenya’s huge commercial farming operations and the pineapple canning establishment in Thika, stand out as among the only vestiges of the age when the town used to lead in terms of manufacturing employment and economic dynamism in Central Kenya.
As you tour the expansive pineapple farm and canning factory and interact with farmers, truck drivers and packers working at the imposing canning plant, the sheer level of activity, the milling of factory workers, leads you to the inescapable conclusion that this large commercial farming operation is indeed a systemically important player in the economy of central Kenya, supporting livelihoods of thousands of households and anchoring the commercial viability of a long supply chain-ranging from traders and transporters to hoteliers.
The contrast between the economic and commercial activities within the Del Monte Kenya establishment and activity in the rest of the Thika neighbourhood and the economy of central Kenya couldn’t be starker.
In place of factories and manufacturing plants, the main economic activity in Thika today is plot by plot urbanisation, concrete jungles dominated by multi-storey rental houses, suffering from a range of problems, including traffic congestion, flooding and poorly constructed rental housing prone to collapsing.
Today Del Monte Kenya finds itself competing for space and attention with real estate developers. Yet as we all know, manufacturing is better at creating more decent and durable jobs. As a journalist, I have always supported the view that businesses must contribute to society. And that they must view their role in society as beyond improving shareholder value by delivering profits and dividends to their shareholders.
Yet I sometimes found myself bewildered at the lengths commercial farming businesses, such as Del Monte Kenya, go when it comes to spending on supporting local communities.
I ask myself whether or not the huge expenditures by these large commercial farming operations on non-core activities and the so-called sustainability programmes aren’t a strain on profitability and whether these old-fashioned models practised mainly by agriculture firms, still make economic and commercial sense.
Take the case of Del Monte Kenya, for instance. Del Monte Secondary School, which is populated by children from the surrounding communities, is provided with free piped water from the company’s dams, firewood for cooking, and lunch for students.
The company furnishes staff offices, grades and maintains the roads leading to the school and playgrounds, pays electricity bills, houses both teaching and non-teaching staff and provides emergency medical services for the students.
The investment in community schools include three other primary schools, eight nursery schools providing early childhood education. In 2010 it opened its own Del Monte Mixed Secondary School, located within one of the company’s farms.
I asked; is the model of big spending on community programmes, and in old-fashioned corporate social responsibility activities going to remain sustainable in the future for operations such as Del Monte Kenya?
According to Del Monte’s new boss Mr Cook, the company intends to move even more decisively towards focusing more on culture, loyalty of employees and human rights.
