allAfrica.com: Liberia: Rebuilding Agriculture from Scratch (Page 1 of 3)

"Before the War" is a phrase woven into the very fabric of Liberian life, repeated countless times as a way to define how far the country has fallen and its infrastructure effectively destroyed as a result of its traumatic 14-year civil war. The economic, education and social sectors were all terribly battered. But perhaps no sector was more badly hit than agriculture and it mirrors both the country's problems and its vast potential for advancing production and processing as well as reducing poverty.

Before the war, Lincoln Yeneken and his family lived in Zolowee, a village in northern Liberia's Nimba County, one of the country's breadbasket regions. He became a subsistence farmer in the tradition of his father and grandfather, growing food to keep the family alive. Life was peaceful and predictable in the lush green rolling hills on the outer flanks of Sanniquellie, Nimba's provincial capital, about 300 miles north of Monrovia and just a stone's throw from the Guinean border.

Every Liberian has a war story to tell. "There were six houses in our compound in the village," says Yeneken. "Then the war came and broke everything down. My father took us to Guinea. He died there."

But Liberians, Yeneken among them, are also resilient. "I've been back for three years," he adds. "When I came back, there was nothing.

"I began by making a small garden with rice, plantain, cassava, and eddoes," he says as he shows off his modest but productive fields, where his wife is harvesting rice. "I'm only planting for the family to eat." He also catches fish in the nearby stream and sets traps for bush meat which he sells.

He and his wife have seven children. He proudly says that his school age children are all in school, which would have been unlikely a few years ago.

Like many other Liberians, Yeneken has hope in the future. "Within the next five years I would like to plant coffee and rubber but I need tools and help to rebuild," he says as he points to the frames of the simple huts and granary for the rice he is now putting up.

He faces many challenges. "The rainy season is very difficult. The only thing we can do then is tap palm and sell the wine." As of now, Yeneken and his family, like most Liberian farmers, are untouched by any program offered by NGOs or government. Because he is not totally convinced that peace will last, he is building his new compound a quarter mile off the main road, down the hill hidden among dense trees in a valley in case warfare breaks out again.

Liberia's civil war began on Boxing Day, December 26, 1989 and ended in 2003 with the departure of then-president Charles Taylor who was granted asylum by Nigeria under a peace pact that brought in a transitional government. In elections held in late 2005, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard University-trained economist and former World Bank executive, was elected Liberia's and Africa's first woman president. Taylor is currently on trial for war crimes. The case is being heard in The Hague because of fears it could ignite violence if it were held in Africa.

During the war an estimated 300,000 people, or 10 percent of Liberia's three million people, were killed; nearly a million refugees left the country and many more were internally displaced. Yeneken, his family and thousands of other Liberians have returned home and are now confronted with the uphill task of rebuilding the country. They say they need all the help they can muster to start afresh.

Agriculture Must Kick Start Economy

War also took a devastating toll on the government's agriculture ministry, which is in the process of rebuilding. Agriculture Minister Chris Toe acknowledges that government depends heavily on external help in getting reconstruction plans off the ground, and that collaboration with national and international partners is critical to getting help to farmers like Yeneken who need it most.

"A number of projects are being directly implemented by donors and the NGOs—they are actually doing some of the work. We are trying to focus government's limited financial as well as human resources on those things that we believe we can do well, and that is to regulate and monitor what is happening within the agricultural sector and to coordinate activities that are going on," Toe explains. "We don't think that only the Ministry of Agriculture is going to develop agriculture."

James Logan, Deputy Agriculture Minister for Planning, adds: "From the onset the government was clear that what was needed to kick start this economy was to pay keen attention to the agriculture sector.

"Agriculture will provide the export income and the basis for taxation that the government can use to sustain development. Agriculture is very important for employment, for getting the refugees who are coming back started, for getting the internally displaced back on the farms, and for training the youth who participated in the war."

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