Africa 24 news

If Sierra Leone isn’t serious about its bread and basket dream of saving more abundance food for its people, it may be hit by severe starvation in the years to come very soon.

This is because world’s nations whose economies are better off than the West African small country are experiencing food shortages. Cuba, India and Syri Lanka are the latest countries to be reported on global TV and online news channels of experiencing food shortages.

For Cuba a report reads: “The World Food Programme (WFP) said it had received an unprecedented official request from the Cuban government for help providing powdered milk to children under seven years of age.

The request is a sign of the seriousness of Cuba’s economic crisis,” BBC news.

Sri Lanka, on the other hand, currently has the worst inflation in the world, with figures standing at 70.2% in August, 2022, according to BBC news.

India, for example, which is the largest producer of rice in the world in July last year, announced a ban on its food export to recipient countries of rice consumers. It said then that it wanted to save up more food since its food storage was running low.

Ukraine, which is one of the largest producers of millet in the world, had also stopped her export of the cereal to other developing nations in the world.

It announced the decision mainly because of Ukraine-Russia ongoing war that has lasted for a year and some months now.

The West Africa French speaking country, Guinea Conakry, ruled by a military government, also around July imposed a ban on essentials food export into Sierra Leone, something our government should be learning a lesson from – that we need to be serious to grow our food we eat other than just doing the talking around expressed plans on food security.

Earlier, the government of Sierra Leone has launched the Feed Salone project in south Pujehun district this year. But the concerns shared by many poor farmers don’t seem to resonate with government’s officials’ plans on calls to growing abundant the nation’s food.

A local peasant farmer talked to us about the several neglects they are facing by government’s agriculture ministry who deny to support them with fertilizers, farms seeds, farms implements, and subsidies.

“We have been working on our farms with bare old hoes to till the lands strenuously; governments, of late, since 2004, have not been supporting us with subsidies, garden or farm seeds and farming tools,” said Mohamed Kanu, a farmer in Tonkolili district.

Sierra Leone’s inflation has been floating prices on foodstuffs, with a bag of rice now sold around Le 900. The country’s inflation stood at 54.20 % as of November, 2023, a record by statista.com indicates.

This means the country needs to explore many options to salvage the economic crisis and key among the alternatives to suppress the inflation on foodstuffs sold in the country is to grow the food Sierra Leoneans eat such as the staple food which is rice and other kinds of food.

But critical observers have said that the government may not meet this target on food sustainability.

And so, the danger is, as government is busy increasing taxes on rice, cement, and other import materials into the country instead of reducing it, it shows a clear sign of one step forward in a nation’s progress on food security and five steps backward in progress.