By Alusine Fullah
If young people have equitable roles in agriculture, leverage technology to revolutionize the field, increase skills and knowledge, and access profitable, dignified, and diverse opportunities throughout agricultural markets within a enabling environment, then they will improve the food and nutrition security of their families, increase the resilience of their communities, and drive their economies forward,” Sumukayo Buka.
Agriculture remains the single largest contributing sector to Sierra Leone’s GDP at 60% and employs well over 65% of the population. The country is endowed with the right conditions to support irrigated and mechanised large-scale food production, enough to meet local demands and for exports. Yet, for years the country has been unable to transform this potential into wealth for its people.
The sector is characterised by small holder production systems, low levels of mechanisation, limited used of improved technologies and practices. Consequently, growth in the sector has hovered around an annual average of 4% for the past decade. Export performance remains low, below 10% of total export value, and constitutes mostly cocoa.
The topmost priority for H.E President Bio in his second term is to ensure Sierra Leone is food self-sufficient within the next five years. Sierra Leone dependence on food import makes her vulnerable and weakens our sovereignty. Going through the Manifesto of the Sierra Leone People Party, it actually prioritized agricultural growth when they coined “Feed Salon”. The manifesto reads:
SLPP makes the following pledges:
▪ Increase Government budget allocation to agriculture to at least 10%
▪ Develop policies to make local production of rice competitive
▪ Invest in research to boost the yields of priority crops like rice, cassava, cocoa, coffee and cashew, as well as livestock productivity
▪ Expand area under rice cultivation through mechanisation and irrigation in the rice bowl of the country
▪ Provide financing options to de-risk private sector investment in processing and value addition
▪ Include key agricultural inputs, such as fertiliser on the list of essential items
▪ Develop financing and insurance schemes to encourage production from small holder farmers in horticulture
▪ Establish a home-grown institutional (school, military, hospitals) feeding programme to induce food production from farmers
▪ Facilitate the establishment of cash crop cooperatives and commodity exchanges to support food processing and aggregation
▪ Provide training and incentives to attract youth in agriculture
▪ Establish at least five Farmer Service and Agri-business Centres across the country in the next three years to support knowledge transfer and provide critical service to farmers
Indeed, what is in that manifesto seems very good. But, giving it a critical lens, the sector needs concerted efforts for its success. Young people are the backbones for the growth of Agriculture. Their ideas are fresh and their health is healthy. The participation of youths in Agriculture has great tendency for the improvement of food growth and economic growth. But how can the sector succeed, when the youth are profoundly swimming in the sea of Kush?
Nevertheless, as it stands, how can the youth participate in agriculture when they are Kushly mad? In recent years or months, the youth of Sierra Leone have taken to the use of synthetic marijuana/drug called “Kush.” It is popularly known to be a variant of marijuana (weed), which a lot of young folks smoke nowadays to, as they say, make them feel good.
Research conducted by the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), described Kush as a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol mixture of plant material sprayed with synthetic psychoactive chemicals similar to the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana/weed.
The agriculture sector has been found to account for poverty reduction and, to that end, the New Direction Government developed its flagship programme that aims to boost investment for agricultural transformation. With Kushly youth populations and rising youth unemployment rates, the contribution by agriculture to poverty reduction will only be sustained by the eradication of Kush.
For the past months, statistics have shown that our youths are in dire need of help from this menace, Kush. Very recently, in a sobering revelation to Parliament, Dr. Sartie Kanneh, the Chief Medical Officer at the Ministry of Health, painted a grim picture of Sierra Leone’s drug crisis, particularly focusing on the surge of Kush abuse among the nation’s youth. He said: “Out of the 2,955 patients admitted to the Kissy Psychiatric Hospital in 2023 for drug-related issues, a staggering 1,865 cases were attributed to Kush, with a concerning 75% falling within the vulnerable age bracket of 20 to 34 years old…”
Apart from Kush, other challenges facing the agriculture sector in Sierra Leone are low participation, low technical and entrepreneurial skills, limited opportunities, and inadequate awareness of agriculture by youth. With agriculture being the economic base for many African countries, it is a sector that can absorb the majority of unemployed youth as skilled and semi-skilled labour.
