Residue Compliance and Biopesticide Transition in Kenyan Horticultural Export Chains
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Abstract
Pesticide residue compliance has displaced yield and logistics as the binding constraint on Kenyan horticultural export growth. Successive tightening of European Union maximum residue limits, combined with rising border interception and increased official control frequency, has reduced export volumes of beans and peas in pods sharply and has exposed the residual chemical dependence of the production system. Biopesticides and biological control agents offer a compliance pathway, yet uptake among smallholder producers remains low despite a comparatively well-developed national registration framework. This narrative review synthesises the regulatory, agronomic and adoption evidence bearing on that gap, and integrates descriptive secondary data drawn from European Union legal instruments and Kenyan sector reporting. The review introduces the Compliance Driven Bioinput Transition Model, an original framework that positions destination market residue standards as the exogenous forcing variable and specifies four domestic mediators through which regulatory pressure is converted into changed input practice. Those mediators are registration capacity, efficacy credibility, advisory quality and aggregation structure, and the framework predicts three distinct outcomes ranging from full substitution to exit from the export channel. The synthesis finds that biological products perform credibly against key pests of French bean when integrated into managed programmes, but that they act more slowly and across a narrower spectrum than the chemistries they replace. Efficacy credibility and advisory quality therefore emerge as the mediators that most constrain transition, rather than registration capacity, which is comparatively strong by regional standards. The analysis reframes bioinput adoption as a trade governance question and identifies advisory reform, group level compliance infrastructure and residue testing access as the priority interventions.
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