West Africa Rising: Sierra Leone looks to 'smallholders' to solve agricultural woes
(Read article summary)The West African nation plans to boost food production via a $400 million project to aid smallholders: subsistence growers farming on plots that average a mere four acres.
Freetown, Sierra Leone
• West Africa Rising is a weekly look at business, investment, and development trends.
Even as it works to attract big-money investments from multinational mining and oil companies, Sierra Leone – a poor West African nation still recovering from a decade of civil war – is turning its attention to a much less flashy group of economic actors: 'smallholder' farmers.
Drawing on funds from a broad swath of donors, the country’s government is shepherding a multi-year $400 million project that aims to boost the productivity and incomes of its smallholders, subsistence growers who eke out a living on plots that average a mere four acres.
“Agriculture supports over 70 percent of the population in this country… but the people aren’t doing it at any profitable level,” says Sheikh Massaquoi, a lecturer in agricultural economics at Sierra Leone’s Njala University. The problem, he says, comes down to the fact that “the capital is lacking and the technology is lacking.”
