LAND HUNGER SIR,—By claiming too large an acreage of your
space for my article last week on 'Land Hunger' in Kenya, I forced you to reduce the length of my third para- graph, dealing with agricultural economics, when it was already in the printer's hands; and your abbre- viation conflated various different remarks about different parts of the Highlands in such a way as to produce. a misleading impression. Europeans do not argue that African peasant farming would be impracticable in the highly fertile, and relatively small, part of the White Highlands west of Nairobi and round Mount Kenya. It is the same as the best land in the Kikuyu reserve which adjoins it, tdi which African farmers are doing exceedingly well. But Europeans do want to keep the land they have got there.
The rest of the Highlands consist of (i) The arid Rift Valley floor, suitable only for ranching on large acreages, whose future is beyond the scope of this letter.
(ii) A large area of moderate land with a moderate rainfall, suitable for dairying and mixed farming and at present divided into European farms of between seven hundred and several thousand acres. Europeans do maintain that this cannot be used to relieve land hunger, because large acreages are necessary to economic farming; Africans can't manage them and can't produce the capital for them.
My point was that, while a five-acre smallholding makes no sense here, a thousand-acre farm is non- sense too, in view of the intense pressure of popu- lation on Kenya's agricultural land. The economic unit of the future on these lands will be a two- three-hundred-acre farm maintaining a family, with a few well-paid labourers, at a good standard of living. The future pattern of Kenya land tenure must be to settle farmers, most of whom will be African, on such farms, and to contract—but not abolish— existing European estates to make way for them. Enthusiastic instruction in the necessary techniques, and generous provision of long-term loans, will be necessary (probably with help from the British Ex- chequer); and the development of co-operative societies and of some measure of collectivisation of machinery, equipment, water storage and land de- velopment will produce a flourishing agricultural community. Africans have not so far had the chance of farming on this scale anywhere in Kenya; but wherever Africans have been given larger respon- sibilities than Europeans considered 'suitable' for them, they have shouldered them as well as Euro- peans.
The Highlands at present provide 46 per cent. of Kenya's agricultural production, permanent homes and a high living standard for 4,000 farmers (so far all European), and tied huts and employment at a few pounds a month for 100,000 or 200,000 African labourers' families who are generally allowed half an acre or more for subsistence cultivation on their employers' lands. But it is inconceivable that 13,000 square miles of agricultural land can support only 4.000 farmers and their underpaid hangers-on, and there is no hostility to Kenya's European farmers in challenging a system they have accepted long enough for it to have become a habit. The real challenge is to their resource and adaptability to make the coming situation succeed, as it unquestion- ably can.—Yours faithfully,
University of Reading
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