CULTURE
Moving beyond subsistence farming in Sierra Leone
Baku, April 15 (AZERTAC). "I hope within five years we are selling on the international market," says Fatmata Sesay means business, a 45-year-old farmer from Kailahun in eastern Sierra Leone.
As head of an organization of farmers - many of them women widowed during the country's brutal civil war - she knows there is strength in numbers.
Before, Sesay just grew enough to feed her family. If she sold, it was only in small quantities and usually at a low price.
But recently she has seen her profits from rice and cassava double - an increase made possible, she reckons, by using high-yielding seeds and by marketing collectively.
And she has seen a change in attitude.
Farmers, buoyed by better earnings, are growing more crops and "beginning to see that farming can be a profitable business," she says.
She hopes that momentum will continue and that farmers, like herself, will be supported in taking it to another level, one that could put them - and the country — on a path to greater prosperity.
The Government of Sierra Leone means business, too, which is why it is moving full speed ahead with its plan to help the country's smallholder farmers make the transition from subsistence to commercial farming.
Boiled down, the five-year, $403 million plan — known as the smallholder commercialization programme — seeks to help farmers grow more and varied crops, process more of what they produce, and market their goods more effectively.
Around 3.5 million people — roughly two-thirds of the country — depend on agriculture, while some 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. By encouraging farmers to "farm for business", Sierra Leone hopes to lift annual agricultural growth to the 7.7 percent needed to halve poverty and hunger by 2015.
To achieve this, the Government is working with FAO and other partners to make sure farmers have better access to quality seeds, fertilizers and machinery as well as training — from improved cropping techniques and group governance to financial management and marketing skills.
It is also making a big push to develop irrigation systems, improve feeder roads so that farmers can get their goods to the market and make it easier for them to access financial services.