Kenya Sets Aside 600,000 Hectares of Farmland for Private Investors

Kenya

In a bold bid to reduce its heavy reliance on food imports, Kenya’s government announced this week that it will open more than 600,000 hectares of farmland to private-sector investment. The move is part of a broader agricultural transformation plan aimed at boosting domestic production, creating jobs and stabilizing local markets.

At the two-day 5th National Agribusiness Summit in Nairobi, Mutahi Kagwe, the country’s Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture and Livestock Development, said the government would allocate approximately 607,000 hectares — including properties managed by the Kenya Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) and several commercial farm units on former prison lands — for large-scale agribusiness ventures.

“The private sector must lead in increasing production. This is how we can feed our people and grow the economy,” Kagwe declared. He indicated that counties such as Homa Bay County and Migori County were already seeking investors for oil-palm cultivation, asserting, “We have enough land in the country to do what we need.”

A Strategic Shift to Private Sector-Driven Growth

Agriculture contributes roughly 22.5 percent of Kenya’s gross domestic product and employs about one-third of the national workforce. Yet, the sector remains constrained by limited irrigation — according to Food and Agriculture Organization data, just 2.2 percent of Kenya’s roughly 7 million hectares of cultivated land had irrigation systems in place in 2022.

Kenya imported nearly US$3 billion worth of food commodities between 2021 and 2023, with wheat, sugar, rice and maize among the most significant items. The government’s newly announced plan is explicitly aimed at reversing that trend. By enabling private-sector access to large tracts of land and streamlining the investment process through a new Land Commercialization Office, officials hope to ramp up production of key value chains such as rice, wheat, oilseeds and pyrethrum.

Opportunities and Challenges Ahead

For prospective investors — both domestic and foreign — the open-land initiative offers a potentially transformative opportunity. With the one-stop investment centre in place, the government is signaling that the bureaucratic hurdles to agribusiness may soon ease. But the plan is not without risks: the country’s irrigation infrastructure remains under-developed, and land-use issues — including fragmentation and competing claims — continue to complicate the agricultural outlook.

The success of Kenya’s strategy will hinge not only on the availability of land, but on whether investors can bring the capital, technology and market links required to translate large-scale farmland into sustained productivity. If the private sector steps in as envisioned, Kenya stands to strengthen its food security, reduce import dependence and generate new employment opportunities. But if execution falls short, the lofty targets may remain out of reach.