Monrovia – Vice President Joseph Boakai has called for practical steps to be taken by the Ministry of Agriculture in helping farmers.
According to VP Boakai, there are policies, technologies and extension programs in the Ministry of Agriculture that are not reaching down to the farmers.
He made the remarks Wednesday at the official launch of the Ecosystem Based Adaptation for Food security Assembly (EBAFOSA-Liberia Branch).
EBAFOSA is the first inclusive Pan-African Policy framework that provides a platform for all stakeholders in the country to collaborate in developing and implementing policy solutions to upscale Ecosystem based Adaptation driven agriculture and its value chains, as well as decentralization and job creation in sustainable way through the use of innovative approaches that decentralizes the development of application of the policy solutions to the grassroots in a participatory way.
In further statements, the Liberian Vice President reminded the Ministry of its responsibility, by extension, to send people out to train farmers.
“As long as we don’t put all these implementations into practice we are not going to yield results.”
“ We used to import just 30% of our consumable food. When we were at the Ministry, 70% of our local food used to be produced locally.
Today, we spend about 200 million United States dollars to bring rice to this country, taking away foreign exchange. Why are we doing that? Because we have a policy, technology that is not reaching the farmers.”
“All of what we talk about here, if the farmers don’t know about it and the Ministry doesn’t reach out to them it is not going to work.”
“People are producing but the role of the Ministry in terms of the policy and technology needs to be taken seriously.”
“ We can do all the talking but we have to get out to the farmers because the farmers don’t know, so in agriculture the production are the farmers who produce because they have to eat but if they are to produce more than they can eat there must be the extension agents who are knowledgeable reaching to the farmers.”
VP Boakai who once served Liberia as an Agriculture Minister called on monitoring agencies to practicalized their work rather than continuously talking with no results.
“I appreciate our meeting and talking but we must act or climate change will meet up with us.”
“We often have the international world telling us what to do, people don’t have to tell us what to do,” VP Boakai stated.
He expressed his frustration that people drive from Monrovia to Buchanan without noticing the sale of vegetable and fruits alongside the road and blames it to the Ministry lack of practical actions.
“You would expect to have a lot of vegetable and fruits to buy but you see there is nothing.”
“I say quite often that you don’t need a Ministry of Agriculture for farmers to produce they have to eat and I believe for me what is important for a Ministry of Agriculture are policy, Technology, and extension.
“The Ministry of Agriculture has a responsibility for coordination because you have all the NGOs coming here, they work for the Ministry I have been a Minister of Agriculture before that is the responsibility of the Ministry.”
Boakai believes there are a lot of technical issues that the Ministry of Agriculture needs to look at especially monitoring NGOs that come to the country to work in that sector.
“People come here with resource and money.”
They spend it on programs that are outside of the Ministry and you think the Ministry is just supposed to be looking on, but when they make their reports they report that Liberia benefited from the money but how the money is spent the Ministry should know, that is how the coordination begins.
“We have quite a lot we can do in this country there are a lot of technical issues we need to look at.“
“The issue of control seeds and species the farmers make a lot of effort they don’t have to go to the “bank to borrow money because nobody will give them a loan but they lost their crops because there is nobody to go there to advise them.”
The Liberian VP also cautioned Liberians about the management of the land because, according to him, it is only the population that increasing and not the land.
“Everything we do we use and we might say we have an abundance of land but land management is very important because in the long run the population will increase but the land might not increase so there are a lot of management issues that are very critical.
“We have a lot of responsibility, we talk about the environmental impact of agriculture, and do the farmers know that?
No, but when they do the farming they suffer in silence because there are no extension agents to teach them what to do,” he added.