By Hassan I. Conteh
Africa news
A buyer asked of the cost for plantains in Freetown’s famous market, Bombay Street market.
The plantains were not in abundance on a cylinder oval tray sold by a petty trader.
While we went about taking photos of the market square, we overhead the conversations between the two women.
The street the buyer had walked past links the market where food products spread about but in very little number.
This reality shows the scarcity of vegetables, condiments, and local produce grown upcountry.
Two and half decades ago (that is, the years 2000, 2010, 2016) markets in the capital, Freetown, used to boom with vegetables products, foodstuffs and cooking commodities. The markets like Freetown’s largest local foods market, Dove Cot, used to be very crowded with people as business booms in those days.
But now, a buyer such as the one on a Thursday 25 this year at Bombay Street couldn’t get all that she wanted to buy in the market.
She was showed on that day three or four ripe plantains tied in a bundle, costing NLe 20.00.
That price could get her fifteen plantains around 2015, which means the plantains were in abundance over the past fifteen years.
She could even buy with that money some plantains while the balance money from the NLe 20.00. can buy her also fish, pepper, salt, onion, to cook a day.
But since the inflation now hits hard on local foodstuffs, on imported condiments, the money now chases to buy only few goods on the markets.
Another reason why goods and overseas foodstuffs are not in plenty supply, these days, in our markets is because the export scale from other countries in the world is very slow.
Some countries in Africa like Ghana and Guinea Conakry have announced stricter actions to stopping the exporting of local foodstuffs and commodities into other countries in Africa, including Sierra Leone.
India, an Asia country and Ukraine, a European country where there is an-on-going war, have also done the same by imposing a strict ban on exporting rice, corn, millet into Africa and other parts of the World.
Sierra Leone is among the countries that hugely consumes rice and is so, it seriously being affected by this ban.
Indian rice export ban to Africa came up last year, end of July followed by Guinean’s ban on rice, corn, groundnut, millet into Sierra Leone.
The government of Guinea promised a six month ban on rice export into Sierra Leone. Its government said it wanted to preserve food stocks for its people.
As the global ban on rice and other foodstuffs happen, Ghana is also pushing for the same.
Sierra Leoneans are sure to face hunger and starvation in the years to come as world’s nations announce plans to shut down local foodstuff export.