Concord Times (Freetown)
Oswald Hanciles
11 May 2011
column
Freetown — The President, H.E. Ernest Bai Koroma President Koroma, is the Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Agriculture and Food Security. He physically would attend meetings – which compromise many cabinet ministers; donor agencies ranging from DfID to EU and USAID; local and international agricultural experts – because he has made ‘Food Security’ the No 1 priority of his Administration. He has apparently given free rein to his agriculture and food security minister, Dr. Joe Sam-Sesay, to provide leadership and managerial guidance for an agriculture revolution in the country. The ongoing revolution in our rural areas is as seismic a shift as that that occurred in Europe during the era of the Industrial Revolution, when societies morphed from sedate rural agricultural ones to smoke-belching crammed industrial ones. Sierra Leone’s agricultural revolution today is all about coaxing, goading, and providing incentives for the about 3,000,000
rural farmers to shift from rural subsistence farming – which has kept them in poverty over the past century – to market oriented farming. It means agricultural experts collaborating with local farmers – the largest segment of our labour force; the largest contributors to our GNP – to leapfrog from crippling poverty to sustainable energetic wealth.
The agricultural minister is in the vanguard of the agricultural revolution with a tactical thrust called “Smallholder Commercialization Programme (SCP)”.
The SCP means supporting the smallholder farmers to move from subsistent to commercial farming – “farm for business” – along the agricultural value chain of improved input supply, mechanized production, processing and marketing. Specifically, farmers in every district are being provided with improved planting materials, machinery, including power tillers, rice threshers, rice cutters, additional rice mills, cassava grating machines, as well as agro-chemicals (fertilizers, weed killers, etc) and other improved inputs.
SCP in Koindadugu
Two months ago, I was part of a field trip of media experts – sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agricultural organization (FAO)/Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security – to Bo, Kenema, Kailahun, Koinadugu, and Bombali districts to get an ‘on-the-ground’ account of the dramatic agricultural process in these districts. Farmers are put into ‘new farm school’s’ – in which synergy and high efficiency is achieved as traditional knowledge about farming is fused with modern ways of farming. In Koinadugu district, out of a targeted 300 Farmer Based Organizations (FBOs), thirty are being nurtured through a programme sponsored by the Italian Agricultural Trust, headed by Sierra Leonean agricultural expert, Justin Goba. When I asked Goba what was his most successful project, he instantaneously said, “honey production”.
From ‘Bee Killers’ to Bee Keepers
In a white non-air-conditioned FAO jeep, the media team drove up the undulating bare-rocked hills in Kabala Town to the main bee keeper ‘factory’, a 1940s-built white flat, in an eerily remote location. There, the lead bee keeper, a Pastor John Kamara, an indigene of the district, who is head of 15 beekeeping FBOs, explained to us the advantages between old ways and new ways of beekeeping.
The healthy-looking 74 year old Pastor Kamara, dressed in dark brown well-worn lace, and dark brown trousers – it was ‘special attire’ he had on, because there was an annual ceremony of Yulankas from Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Liberia in Kabala Town on the Sunday we arrived; a ceremony that was graced by President Koroma – with shoes encrusted in dust, wearing on his head a fez cap with brilliant gold and light blue thread, told us with showmanship, that he is now popularly known in the district as “Pastor Honey”. He said that he has been engaged in beekeeping since he was fourteen years of age, learning from his late father. He explained with flair: “We used to exterminate all the honeycomb, now, we use one honeycomb thrice. We have changed from being bee killers to being bee keepers”
He bemoaned the OLD WAYS of being ‘bee killers’ to us: They would use cow dung to plug holes of the bee comb, and “This used to contaminate the honey”.
One of the media team present remarked that he had heard that bee keepers in the district would approach bee hives to harvest honey while being completely naked. ‘Pastor Honey’ said that was true. “The bees used to bite me until I almost would go crazy with pain, ending with acute fever”. He explained that the naked body approach to bee hives was because when the bees would attack it would be easier to get rid of them if one would have no clothes on. Pastor Honey demonstrated to us the ‘NEW WAYS’ – dressed in protective clothing, from head to toe, including gloves and boots, so no bee would sting him.
Another bad thing about the ‘OLD WAY’ is that bee keepers would set huge bonfires to smoke out the bees from their hives. Today, with the SCP’s NEW WAY, a small blow lamp-like equipment is used, and it targets smoke to only the beehive, causing no environmental damage to hive and outlying areas.
“We used to poison people, but, we didn’t know”, Pastor Kamara said, with remorse at his OLD WAYS of being a ‘bee killer’; then, he grew exultant.
“Mr. Goba is my father. (Goba is the agriculture specialist in Koinadugu, guiding the Smallholder Commercialization Project there). I used to be insignificant; but, now I have power. I am a specialist in this business…. I tell people that bee keeping makes you easier and faster money than even farming….”
Sierra Leone’s honey is about the most competitive in Africa, Pastor told us he learned that after attending a convention on honey producers from Africa in Italy last year. In spite of having qualitative honey, Sierra Leone’s export into international market is a minuscule of total exports even from Africa, falling far below what Ghana exports. Zambia, the largest exporter of honey from Africa, exports about $2million worth of honey a year, of the about $2billion global market; with China being the biggest exporter to the EU.
Organic Foods
There is a concept I have been introduced to through Jefferson McCarthy – it is called “organic foods”. Jefferson -or, as he calls himself in the Freedom of Information-Sierra Leone cyber forum we both are members of, “Ngor Jeff” – is a doctorate degree student in a university in the Netherlands. Ngor Jeff has been encouraged by Dr. Joe Sam-Sesay’s agriculture ministry to experiment with his ideas of teaching indigenous farmers – he took me four months ago to a sixty acre experimental farm he has initiated in Lunsar, Port Loko District – to grow, and market, ‘organic foods’ to the European market. This has to include exploiting the potential in honey gathering and honey marketing to the European Union.
In industrialized countries, honey remains one of very few totally natural and unaltered foods available to consumers. Part of honey’s image and reputation is as a wholesome, natural food, and there is therefore much interest to have sources of honey that are organic certified. There is a premium price available to beekeepers who can supply organic certified honey, which is in especially strong demand within EU countries. Honey comes from bees, of course. So, the bees themselves have to ‘suck nectar’ from ‘organic environments’.
Bees commonly forage within a range of two kilometers from their nest or hive i.e. over an area of 12.6 km2. To ensure that honey is organic, this entire area must be organic, and the regulations stipulate land within three kilometres (EU) or four miles (UK). Beekeeping was added to the EU law (regulation 2092/91) governing livestock production in 2000. This means that within the EU, honey may be labeled and sold as organic only if it is produced, and certified in accordance with the requirements detailed in this law.
For a country to be eligible to export honey to the EU, it is essential for the nation’s name to be added to the EU’s list of ‘third countries’ eligible to do so. To achieve this it is necessary to show that the nation has a ‘Residue Monitoring Scheme’ established for the analysis of honey for residues of antibiotics, sulphonamides, pesticides and heavy metals as defined in EU legislation.
This legislation denies access to EU markets for most African countries, even though chemical residues are not a problem in African honey. This is because beekeepers in rural areas of Africa still harvest from stocks of indigenous, wild honeybees, uncontaminated by the diseases and exotic predators that now afflict bees in most other world regions. For this reason, African beekeepers do not apply medicines to their bees and are able to harvest the residue-free honey that is currently in short supply on the world market. (In 2005, the EU slapped a ban on honey imports from China because they detected anti-biotics in Chinese-produced honey. If African countries like Sierra Leone were prepared, they could have taken advantage of the shortage of honey supply to the EU and earn millions of dollars in profits). Producer groups and relevant government departments need technical awareness on how to set up cost effective monitoring schemes to meet the
standard required by the legislation. Dr. Alpha Wurie, in the diagnostic facility he owns, RAMSY, on Liverpool Street in Freetown, plans a new extension. He showed me last month equipment ready to do such testing of honey, and other food products, to determine their fitness for local consumption, and export into the richest markets of the world.
Interdisciplinary Approach
For the vision of President Koroma to be speedily made into concrete reality, there has to be an interdisciplinary approach to all food security matters – involving not only agriculture experts, marketing specialists like Ngor Jeff, chemists like Dr. Alpha Wurie,, but, youth, women, and religious leaders. The marketing differential advantage of honey from tropical rainforest countries like Sierra Leone is that the bees forage in species-rich forests. But, if we continue the suicidal centuries old traditional slash-and-burn methods of farming and destroy nearly all our forests, if we allow commercial logging for exports in the about 3 percent of virgin tropical rainforests remaining, then, we will kill the honey potential even before we begin to fully exploit it. There is a symbolism in ‘honey’ as well as a physical reality of its sweetness. For us to sweeten our sociological and political environment in our country enough to tap into rich markets, we must put, figuratively, unadulterated honey into our thoughts and words, and actions.
AllAfrica – All the Time