By Hassan I. Conteh

Growing crops to ensure food sufficiency in Sierra Leone is still a difficult thing as farmers still use their bare hands to till the land.

They lack as basic as hoes, cutlasses, wilbarrows, and knife-harvesters.

Blacksmith men have long abandoned the art. Villages, suburbs, hamlets are now crumbling up !

Young men leave villages for the city, Freetown. Some go to other mini cities: Bo, Kenema and Makeni.

Old men couldn’t stay in the farm. Women, old and young have taken a similar path like men and the boys.

While the old folk women either come to stay with relatives or their daughters and sons in the city.

Or they choose to stay in the village but couldn’t do hard work on farms.

Young women sap out the courage to weed up the farms as village communal labour work decline in villages.

The few young bloods in villages are now into motorcycling or bike riding. Farms are left to lie fallow.

Subsistence farming which has been Sierra Leoneans’ mainbase is replete with several shortcomings.

The farming practice is never a like-to-go area like it was in the late 1990s before the civil war broke out in Sierra Leone.

And since Sierra Leone is yet to call for a divorce on subsistence agriculture/farming, the peasant farmers continue to live a peasant life, a factor which has forced many to abandon farming in the country.

Can government takes up mechanized farming?

Or can it strengthen subsistence agriculture by empowering peasant farmers? Will all these prove a far-fetched dream?

The growing need of fertilizers and organic manure is giving a deaf ear by government agriculture ministry.

Farmers wish government to help them with fast-growing up monthly crops seeds, to provide them with working tools, to give them financial  incentives, bicycles at least for a start before graduating to bulldozers and other modern agricultural implements. India talks of drone-farming these days? Yet, farmers in Sierra don’t have metal hoes, farm-wagon, cutlasses, axes, etc.

Currently, gauging the impact that fertilizers shortages are causing on food crops grown in Sierra Leone, a group of farmers in Waterloo and elsewhere have recently said some new kinds  of insects (green and brown in colour) have been damaging their plants especially the English maize crops.

The problem with these types of insects affecting European crops is becoming the growing concern for farmers in Sierra Leone.

”The local seed crops (maize, green kidney beans,) are resistant to the infestation caused by flies-carrying insects.

But the European seeds which mature within a three month period can be easily destroyed by these tiny insects,” says Joseph Kanu, a farmer at Fire manbo community in Waterloo, Western Area Rural District, Sierra Leone.

The farmer’s thirty years’ experience in farming and gardening has never seen such a destruction caused by these insects.

”We are faced with two notable challenges: we don’t get the money to buy fertilizers and local mulatium liquid which is helping to kill these insects,” Kanu explains.

The mulatium liquid is the chemical which farmers and gardeners often apply on crops especially maize to ward off the insects.

But now, Kanu said, the cost on the chemical has risen dramatically, putting a jerry can at between Le 800, 000 and Le 1 million (old leones).”

Farmers in Sierra Leone, unlike in the past two decades, are not being provided with seeds and fertilizers.

And the absence of support by government and other partners to farmers with the provision of seeds and fertilizers have rendered crop growers to be largely unproductive.

”Many of us have not been getting any support from the Ministry of Agriculture and NGOs for the past years now,” says Kanu.

Kanu boasts that he could grow variety of crops such as cucumber, okara, beans, cabbage and Chinese cabbage, lettuce , white and red radishes, carrot, cauliflower , pastry, etc. if the right support is there” says the farmer.

He further said, in the past, around 2004, they used to get European seeds and Chinese cabbage from visiting tourists or investors who don’t eat the country’s local food.

”In those days, you would get most White people arranging a trip to Sierra Leone” he recalled.

And by that we the gardners back then at Gloucester village (in the capital) would grow varieties of the vegetables and crops which the visiting whites people like.

But since those days they have not been coming as usual in the past into the country again,” Kanu recalled.

”We get most of those overseas (European and Chinese) seeds to plant from crop store at Brookfields Multiplication Seeds in Freetown. Most of the seeds and fertilizers there sold in those days are from Holland,” he said.

Sierra Leonean farmers are struggling a lot in doing farming work. The world’s recent pandemics and epidemics and existing wars like the Ukraine-Russia crisis have caused farmers and gardeners to run short of fertilizers supplies.

The local organic manure which Sierra Leonean farmers usually apply on crops fields is not in plenty supply.

Livestock rearing by Sierra Leoneans is becoming a daydream adventure.

Since the government of Sierra Leone has not been helping farmers with fertilizers and organic manure, local food crop growers have become complacent.

”These corn crops would have grown plenty and healthy had I got plenty supply of some bags of fertilizers,” says Kanu, a farmer in Waterloo.

”I don’t see much profit on other businesses than on agriculture. How I wished I had had money to buy fertilizers that would have enabled these bean seeds to have grown much bigger in size and height, ” Kanu said.

The zeal is there for most farmers to grow their own food and sell the remaining but the support by government is lacking.

What looks like a direct opposite of some scientists’ claims about climate change affecting crops in Africa and in some parts of the world is that Kanu denies the destruction on his crops hasn’t anything to do with the impacts of climate change in the world.

”Like I told you, when pesticides are not applied on crops growing young, your food crops are sure to be affected by certain kinds of insects which are never strange to us anymore; it is not climate change” the farmer, Kanu, claims.

Like Waterloo gardeners and farmers living in rural are facing difficulties to grow crops.

”We had wished we were under the times of Late President Ahmad Tejan-Kabba. Between 2003 and 2005, we used to be provided with free fertilizers by agriculture ministry by the Kabba administration,” a farmer in one of the villages in Yoni, north of Sierra Leone, had said.

Food insecurity around the world is threatening most countries and the African continent seems to be the hardest-hit.

To prevent their domestic food from gradually running out, countries like India and Guinea, have recently, end of July 2023, banned the shipments of rice, corn, millet and varieties of similar food crops into other countries in the world.

As this sad phenomenon exists, local farmers in Sierra Leone are now calling for support by the government to enable be able to overcome insects which are killing their crops on farms.

They are wishing to see less cost on fertilizers or having free supplies of fertilizers which will help their plants to grow rapidly and healthily so that the poor farmers could get appreciable profits on the yields and be able to save more to eat.