Nairobi, Aug. 31 -- A coffee cherry leaves a farm in Nyeri for a few shillings a kilo. Months later it returns as a branded bag on a Nairobi shelf or a flat white in a London cafe at many times the price. Almost none of the difference stayed in Kenya. The roasting, the grading, the branding, the packaging, the financing, the market relationship. All of it was captured somewhere else.

That gap is the whole story.

Kenya is often described as an agricultural success. Underneath, it is a raw material exporter. We sell cherry, not coffee. We sell leaf, not tea. We sell nut, not the finished product. The country grows some of the best commodities in the world and lets others earn the expensive part of the chain.

The numbers are not marginal....