By Dadson A. Musa

Sierra Leone, located on the west coast of Africa has a conducive vast and untapped farmland. The country experiences unfailing rain fall every year. With the availability of precious minerals like diamond, rutile, gold, bauxite, zircon, etc, there has been distraction from focusing on agriculture. And the saying is so true that no nation thrives on empty stomach. So, 80% of our staple food, rice, is imported and it is estimated that we spend up to $400,000,000 every year for this. That in itself makes for trade imbalance or balance of payment deficit.

Now that there is a renewed focus on agriculture to ensure we reduce rice importation. Donors and other partners have started pouring money to address the food insufficiency problem in this country. But they are faced with huge challenges or threats. If these challenges are not looked into or addressed duly, then millions poured in the sector will amount to nothing.

The first challenge is our road network leading to and from the farms. They are still in terrible shape. So, accessing the farms and the markets is proving very difficult for the farmers. Vehicles, tractors and other machinery can easily get faulty. They cause farm produces to perish. Bad roads also cause delay in getting products to the market.

Another serious challenge facing our farmers is post-harvest losses. So much of our rice after harvest is lost due to lack of proper storage facilities. It also goes for vegetables and other farm products. The barns are not well constructed or safe enough for storage. Late harvest is also causing huge loss of farm products. And facilities for preservation are grossly inadequate or non- existent. So, after toiling for months, our farmers are still losing harvested products a lot.

Inadequate farm technicians or engineers is another serious challenge. A lot of the consultants, engineers for our agricultural projects are foreigners for now. So local content is not addressed and money poured end up with foreigners so there is huge capital flight which is not good for our economy. We are only beginning to train our own experts for mechanized or commercial farming.

Lack of energy and proper irrigation system is another huge challenge. We need electricity supply to get certain farm implements working. And in rural areas where most farms are, there is no electricity. And for now, we rely on rain-fed agriculture which is once a year when it should be year-round if there is proper irrigation system to ensure there is enough food.

Climate change has also started playing havoc to our farmers. In the last rainy season and most other rainy seasons, suitable farmlands around the country were seriously flooded due to unusually heavy down pours. Most farmers could not get bumper harvest because of this. The rainy season also extended well into the dry season which is very unusual in Sierra Leone.

Finally, to be able to achieve food self-sufficiency, we must take politics away from it. Politicians have no business being farmers. They must stop pretending that they are farmers. For the achievement of food sufficiency, they should leave the practice to career farmers but make policies that support their trade without bias. We are still a long way from achieving our food sufficiency goals but if we look into these and other challenges, then we’ll start feeding ourselves soon.

Copyright –Published in Expo Times News on Monday, February 12th, 2024 (ExpoTimes News – Expo Media Group (expomediasl.com)