NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 8 – Kenya will receive bulk corn at the Port of Mombasa to help cool down the high price of maize flour, which now retails for more than Sh200 per two-kilo packet.
The Stellar Lady ship from Odessa, Ukraine, is set to dock at the Kenyan coast on March 13, 2023.
Over the last year, maize flour prices have been rising amid a prolonged drought coupled with a depressed maize harvest across the country.
Low supply has pushed the demand for the product, with millers unable to source corn from within.
While a two-kilo packet was retailing for about Sh100, it now stands at around Sh200, impacting millions of Kenyan households.
To stabilize the high prices, the government has resorted to importation to fill the gap.
In January of this year, Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi assured Kenyans that the cost of maize flour would come down in February.
“We are going to import maize and rice and we are not doing it because we want. The projections are so bad that if we don’t do it our people will die for lack of food,” he said earlier.
“By the end of February the price of unga and rice will have come down.”
Rising inflation is also expected to hurt more families at a time when commodity prices are already high.
This comes after Kenya’s cost of living increased slightly in February to 9.2 percent from 9 percent in January, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS).
“The rise in inflation was largely due to an increase in prices of commodities under food and non-alcoholic beverages (13.3 per cent); housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels (7.6 per cent); and transport (12.9 per cent) between February 2022 and February 2023,” said KNBS.
