By Fatmata Jengbe
On the 24th November 2020, Frank Webber, of the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food (SiLNoRF) engaged 45 farmers drawn from various communities in the Western Area Rural District during which he informed them that the 66th Session of the United Nations General Assembly declared the International Year of Family Farming in 2014 because farmers are very important as they produce 80% of the food consumed in the world but lamented that farmers are poor in Sierra Leone.
He made the disclosure during a workshop organized by SiLNoRF at the Campaign for Good Governance (CGG) Hall, Waterloo outside Freetown to discuss and validate the document on the Family Decade of Farming revealing that African countries met in Uganda requesting the UN to recognize and honor farmers by giving them ten years for which the UN General Assembly met and endorsed that 2019-2028 should be observed as the Decade of Family Farming.
Webber further urged participants to make salient contributions to be included in the Global Action Plan on Family Farming, especially in relation to food security intimating that SiLNoF approached the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to support the regional consultations that have taken place in Makeni, Port Loko, Freetown and Kabala underscoring that Sierra Leone can feed itself but that the country is not serious reiterating that the huge resources allocated to the Ministry of Agriculture are not reaching the intended beneficiaries.
He gave as example the $90 million with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) for five years but that the people are not getting the required services underscoring that even the Food Security Policy has not been approved and called for a review of the draft Food Security Policy intimating that after the regional consultations, the policy would be validated and launched.
Webber continued by encouraging participants to make their voices heard in the document reminding them that the national plan would feed into the global plan. He also urged them to make their inputs stating that farmers also need markets to sell their fresh produce to make farming sustainable and appealed to them to take farming seriously and not to depend on Government.
The Western Area District Agriculture Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture, Jane Fea Kabba-Sei reiterated the need to include farmers in the process because they have passion for farming and for their voices to be heard, also highlighting the need for transformation and observed that there are gaps in the policy that must be corrected reiterating that if farmers miss it now they would suffer for the next ten years affirming that change comes from them.
Other topics discussed were the conditions required to achieve the right to adequate food, food safety and consumer protection, climate change, ecosystem, aquaculture, animal husbandry, forestry and crops.
Participants were divided into seven groups to work on the seven pillars of the policy.
Highlights of the interactive session were the group work presentations and the question and answer session.
