The Del Monte Kenya Story: Pineapple estates: who lost what?
In nineteen sixty five, two years after independence, Kenya’s government set out to build a new export business on the plains near Thika, about forty kilometres from Nairobi.
The crop was pineapple. And the business was designed in two halves.
One half was an estate and a factory, run by an American company.
The other half was smallholder farmers in the hills around it, growing pineapple on their own land and paid for what they delivered to that factory.
Within a few years, only one half was left.
The estate.
Sixty years on, it is still there, on the same ground. And it is still the whole of Del Monte Kenya.
TWO HALVES
The plains northeast of Thika had been growing pineapple since early in the twentieth century.
Local accounts credit a settler named Russell Bowker, who came up from South Africa after the Second Boer War, with bringing the crop to the area.
In the late nineteen forties, a company called Kenya Canners began canning pineapple in Thika itself.
It sold mainly at home, to the Kenyan market.
Out on the plains, the land that Del Monte Kenya holds today was being farmed by an Anglo French company, for sisal and coffee.
That company failed, and its farm was left behind.
By the nineteen sixties, then, the pieces were already on this ground. A crop. A cannery. And a large farm that had failed.
In nineteen sixty three, Kenya became independent, and Jomo Kenyatta led its first government.
A new state needs things it can sell abroad, and the foreign currency those sales bring in. Kenya’s new government wanted more of both.
Its Minister of Agriculture was Bruce McKenzie. He was a South African born settler who had stayed on after independence, and he was one of Jomo Kenyatta’s close advisers.
McKenzie invited an American investor into the country. It was California Packers, the American company behind the Del Monte brand.
He persuaded California Packers to buy a stake in Kenya Canners, the factory that was already working in Thika.
And Jomo Kenyatta permitted the company to take over the failed Anglo French farm out on the plains.
No founder runs this story.
McKenzie brokered the deal. Jomo Kenyatta permitted it. California Packers bought in. Kenya Canners was already there. None of them founded Del Monte Kenya, and none of them ran it.
What founded it was an agreement between a government and a company, and a plan.
In nineteen sixty five, Del Monte Kenya Limited was formally established. Its mandate was to build a new export earner for the country, a fourth cash crop.
And the plan was stated plainly. Jomo Kenyatta’s intent was for pineapple to be grown in two ways at once.
The company’s estate would grow it on a large scale, down on the plains, on the land of the failed farm.
And smallholder farmers, outgrowers, would grow it on their own land in Kiambu, in Murang’a and in Nyeri, in the hills around and above Thika.
They would bring their fruit to the factory, and they would be paid on delivery.
The smallholder half was the government’s to build. Its agriculture ministry would set up the schemes that the farmers joined.
An estate on the plains. Farms in the hills. One factory, buying from both. A new crop for the company, and cash for the farmers in the hills.
It was a design that shared the crop.
ONE ESTATE
In the late nineteen sixties, the smallholder pineapple schemes were set up.
The man pushing them forward was Geoffrey Kariithi, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, and a powerful figure in the new government.
The ministry had its own scientists, and they had already advised on where the crop could grow.
Above roughly fifty seven hundred feet, they said, the ground was unsuitable for pineapple.
According to archival records reported by the Nation newspaper, Kariithi pushed ministry officers to set up the smallholder schemes at altitudes the scientists had advised were unsuitable.
The ministry that was meant to build the smallholder half had put it on ground its own scientists had called unsuitable.
And the schemes failed. The smallholder half of the plan collapsed.
The record shows a decision, and the advice it went against. It does not show why the decision was taken, and we are not going to supply a reason.
What became of the farmers who planted pineapple under those schemes is not in any record found for this episode. We cannot say how many there were, or what they did next.
By the end of the nineteen sixties, the company had moved entirely to growing on its own estate. Large scale. A single crop. Its own land.
The estate was now the company.
That model was not simply imposed on Kenya from outside. The alternative to it had failed, and it had failed on the government’s side of the ledger.
Above the estate, the owners changed. At some point the company was renamed Del Monte Royal, when two South African families each took a thirty per cent stake. The remaining shares were held by smaller shareholders.
The sources examined for this episode do not name the families, or say when it happened.
Inside the estate, the question was the workers. In nineteen ninety nine, human rights and labour groups launched international boycott campaigns against the company, over worker safety and alleged intimidation of union members.
On the fifth of October, two thousand, the Kenya Human Rights Commission demanded that the company stop intimidating trade unionists.
In July two thousand and one, the company signed a worker rights agreement, and improvements were reported afterwards.
The pressure had produced an agreement, and the agreement had produced reported change.
In two thousand and two, it was certified under S A eight thousand, an international standard for workplace conditions.
And in October two thousand and four, a Kenyan court ordered five and a half million shillings in compensation for three workers exposed to toxic emissions.
That is the last point at which people working on this estate appear in the record we found. No account from anyone working there today was found, and we will not assume that the work there now looks like it did in two thousand and one, or like anything else in this story.
Above them, the owners changed again. In two thousand and two, the Italian food group Cirio took a ninety eight per cent stake, and the company became Cirio Del Monte Kenya.
Within about two years, Cirio had collapsed at home in Italy.
The business passed to Fresh Del Monte Produce. It bought the European business that had included Cirio’s Del Monte operations, and with it, the estate near Thika.
Fresh Del Monte Produce owns it today. Its chairman and chief executive since nineteen ninety six has been Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh.
It is not the Del Monte company that filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States in twenty twenty five. That is a separate business.
Four sets of owners in all. The estate beneath them did not change.
By twenty eleven, the estate and its cannery could process about fifteen hundred tonnes of pineapple a day.
The company employed more than six thousand people directly.
It was regularly cited as making Kenya one of the world’s top five exporters of canned pineapple, and as the country’s largest single manufactured export.
Its revenue in twenty eleven was about four point five billion shillings.
The fourth cash crop of nineteen sixty five had been built. The new export earner was earning.
THE LEASE
In nineteen seventy three, by the company’s own account in later court filings, Del Monte Kenya began occupying the parcel of land that sits at the centre of today’s dispute.
It held that parcel on a forty-nine-year lease.
According to the Standard newspaper, one prominent Kiambu family received roughly three thousand acres of the estate’s land, and leased it straight back to the company.
The sources examined for this episode do not name the family.
The estate as a whole covers more than eight thousand hectares, about twenty thousand acres, across the line between Kiambu and Murang’a counties. Sources differ on the exact size. This is the figure in the most recent of them.
In February twenty ten, a parcel of Del Monte land was transferred to a company called Ananas Holdings. Ananas divided it into plots and began selling them to third parties.
In twenty twenty, the Kandara Residents Association took that transfer to the Environment and Land Court. Its case was that public land had been improperly disposed of. It named Ananas Holdings and four others.
Two county governments, Murang’a and Kiambu, made a larger demand. Before any renewal of the company’s lease, they wanted between five and eight thousand acres surrendered.
Two presidents intervened, one after the other. Uhuru Kenyatta tried to broker a resolution. Then William Ruto tried. The dispute had needed a head of state, twice.
Neither settled it.
Land like this in Kenya is held from the state on a lease, and a lease has an end date.
The forty-nine-year lease ran out in April twenty twenty two. The company says it now holds a ninety-nine-year lease, dated from the first of December, twenty twenty.
Forty nine years from nineteen seventy three. Ninety nine, the company says, from twenty twenty. The counties contest it.
In April twenty twenty five, the Environment and Land Court dismissed a motion brought by the company itself. That is the most recent dated ruling in the record found for this episode.
A later report in the Nation says a court halted a Murang’a bid to reclaim the land. When that ruling came, and what it settled, is not clear from the record we have.
Beneath the lease there is an older question, about who was on this land before any company was.
Community groups around the estate describe it as ancestral land. They allege that colonial era evictions, the burning of homes, killings and rapes were used to clear it. They have pressed that claim by petition and in the courts.
A Nation investigation into the documentary record reached a different view. It found little or no evidence of earlier human occupation on these particular plains, and said they were recorded as uninhabited bushland when the land was first adjudicated.
It drew a contrast with land at Kericho, where the archives do show earlier occupation.
No independent historian or archive that settles the question was found for this episode. There are two accounts. We are not going to choose between them.
A company, two counties, a residents’ association and two presidents have all had a claim or a stake in this land. In the record found for this episode, the lease they argue over is still undecided.
THE GUARDS
On the twenty first of June, twenty twenty three, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a joint investigation into the estate. It set out what people living around the estate said its guards had been doing to them.
It was built on a letter of claim from the British law firm Leigh Day, acting for one hundred and thirty-four residents of the communities around it.
The letter of claim is the formal first step toward a legal action in Britain.
The claim alleges one hundred and forty six incidents of violence by the estate’s security guards over roughly a decade. Among them, it alleges five deaths and five rapes since twenty nineteen.
The estate’s guards at that time were the company’s own, employed directly.
The claim alleges beatings with whips, with batons, with metal bars and with machetes.
And it alleges a pattern, in which the people who were beaten were then arrested and jailed for stealing pineapples, while the guards were not held to account.
Every part of that is an allegation, and we report it as one.
The response in Britain was quick. Tesco suspended its orders from Del Monte Kenya, saying it was shocked and appalled. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose refused to stock the farm’s products.
Those were decisions by British retailers about what to sell. They are recorded here as that.
In July twenty twenty three, the Bureau reported another alleged attack by the estate’s guards, this time on two teenagers. Bereaved families demanded a meeting with the company’s management.
In December twenty twenty three, four men suspected of stealing pineapples were found dead in a river near the farm.
How they came to be there is not established in the record found for this episode.
In March twenty twenty four, Del Monte Kenya dismissed roughly two hundred to two hundred and fifty of its in-house security guards.
In their place, it signed a partnership with the global security company G four S, to professionalise security on the estate. The managing director, Wayne Cook, signed it.
Cook has said publicly that the company does not bribe, and does not instruct its guards to beat.
The guards the company had employed directly were replaced by guards employed by a contractor.
The in-house guards were gone. A professional contractor held the estate’s edge now, under a new contract. It was the remedy, and it was a real change.
In June twenty twenty four, Morrisons dropped the farm as a supplier, over human rights concerns.
In October twenty twenty four, seven months after the switch, the Bureau reported that G four S guards had been accused of a further brutal attack on the estate. Community sources said the abuses had continued under the new arrangement.
On the eighth of August, twenty twenty five, a man was run over and killed by a G four S pickup, on a public road that runs through the estate. According to reporting, he was suspected of stealing pineapples.
People protested over his death.
On the twelfth of August, four days after the first death, during those protests, a man named in reports as Stephen Marubu Kibandi was shot dead by police officers who were backing the G four S guards.
A witness said he had his hands raised when he was shot.
Both deaths came under the security arrangement that had been installed, seventeen months earlier, as the remedy. The Kenya Human Rights Commission said the violence at the plantation was escalating.
Three kinds of guard have held this estate’s edge in the record. The company’s own. Then a contractor’s, brought in as the remedy. Then police officers beside the contractor. Each change altered who was standing there, and harm was reported under each of them.
That record covers about a decade, not sixty years. And nothing in it happened by itself. Where the record names who acted, it names people: guards, a driver, police officers.
The man on the road on the eighth of August was Michael Muiruri Murigi. He sold vegetables.
According to the reporting, he was not involved in any pineapple theft. He had been on his way back from selling his vegetables.
SIXTY
The same month, August twenty twenty five, Del Monte Kenya and the police signed a security partnership. Wayne Cook signed it for the company.
A joint operation by the government and the company ran on the estate. It was called Operation Linda Mananasi, which means Operation Protect the Pineapples.
It put more than fifty police officers on the estate for two weeks.
The police say it recovered about sixteen thousand nine hundred pineapples, and made two hundred and twenty two arrests.
The operation was then itself accused, in reporting by the Nation, of the same kind of brutality.
On the fourth of October, twenty twenty five, the Kenyan Senate held a hearing. Senators from across party lines denounced the killings and the allegations of torture, and demanded accountability.
No legislative or prosecutorial outcome from that hearing was found for this episode.
Through all of this, the company’s answers in the reporting we examined came from Kenya, from its managing director and its spokespeople. We found no statement on the deaths from the head office of Fresh Del Monte Produce. That is a limit of what we examined. It is not a finding that the head office said nothing.
And through all of it, the business kept going. Nothing found for this episode shows that the supermarkets’ decisions cost Del Monte Kenya materially.
In February twenty twenty six, the company opened a new frozen fruit facility worth many millions of shillings, and a solar power plant.
It is still building.
On the fifth of May, twenty twenty six, Del Monte Kenya marked sixty years, and released what it called its Sixty Year Impact Report. The company commissioned it. Lotus Consulting prepared it.
It was launched at a company event, and its figures were carried almost word for word across Kenyan business media.
According to that commissioned report, the company’s exports in twenty twenty four were worth about a hundred and one million dollars.
The same report puts the company’s contribution to Kenya’s economy since two thousand and four at more than one hundred billion shillings.
And it says the company supports about twenty thousand jobs a year, directly and through its suppliers.
The last independently reported revenue figure for Del Monte Kenya is four point five billion shillings, for twenty eleven. Nothing more recent was found for this episode.
The commissioned report’s figures may well be right. They have not been independently tested.
Whether the Leigh Day claim, for one hundred and thirty-four residents, was ever filed in court, settled or dropped is not established in the record found for this episode.
And the people in it are counted in that record, not followed. Journalists quoted some of them at the time of particular events. Nothing we found follows any of them afterwards: not compensation, not a prosecution of any guard, not what became of them. We have their number. We do not have their stories, and we will not invent them.
In nineteen sixty five, Kenya’s government designed a pineapple business in two halves. Within a few years, one half had been lost, on the government’s own side. The other half became one estate near Thika, and for sixty years that estate has been Del Monte Kenya.
Four sets of owners have come to it. The estate has stayed. It exports. It employs. It is still building. And it is still contested, at its edge and in its lease.
The business and the harm reported around it have run side by side. Neither has ended the other.
As of the twenty eighth of September, twenty twenty six, whose lease it is has not been decided. What became of the claim has not been established. And what the people who live around the estate would say about any of this is not in the record at all.
This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- TWO HALVES. The plains northeast of Thika had been growing pineapple since early in the twentieth century.
- THE LEASE. In nineteen seventy three, by the company’s own account in later court filings, Del Monte Kenya began occupying the parcel of land that sits at the centre of today’s dispute.
- THE GUARDS. On the twenty first of June, twenty twenty three, the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published a joint investigation into the estate.
- SIXTY. The same month, August twenty twenty five, Del Monte Kenya and the police signed a security partnership.
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