Kenya's tea farms weather political violence

By C. Bryson Hull

KERICHO, Kenya (Reuters) - Kenya's large Rift Valley tea estates say they should weather political and ethnic violence targeting their work force, but it is cold comfort to the roughly 20,000 tea pickers who had to run for their lives.

They represent about a third of the 70,000 workers who bring in Kenya's largest cash crop in the heart of the east African nation's tea belt, a humid and green swathe of the west Rift.

But in what may be one of the only times in history farmers have considered drought lucky, fewer workers are needed right now as the tea suffers from its worst lack of rain in 25 years.

"Fortunately, this political unrest has come when there is drought where production has already dropped," said Titus Kuria, chairman of the Kenya Tea Growers Association that represents the large-scale plantations.

"If by about March when the rains come, the political situation is not stable, then workers won't come back and we'll lose a lot of crop," he said. "The prices obviously will go up."

Like other areas of the Rift where outside tribes have settled to work or farm, the green expanses of Kericho's tea fields erupted in violence after President Mwai Kibaki was declared winner of a disputed election on December 30.

What has sent workers fleeing for safety has been a combustible mix of political antagonism and ethnic animosity. Local Kalenjins chased away Kisiis and a handful of Kikuyus who work on the tea estates.

"The Kalenjins don't want them," barber Kimutai Kigen said. "People here feel disadvantaged, because the foreign tribes who came here to pick tea live under better conditions than them. They don't pay rent in company houses, they get benefits."