KPAYMUE — Kermue Jutee returns from his 10 acres of beans, pepper, and okra farm on a wet Saturday afternoon, looking very frustrated.
As a well-known farmer who has been cultivating big plots of land over the past 10 years, he is now worried about what else to do to earn money to support his family as he watches his only source of income being destroyed by a growing number of different kinds of pests.
The memory of the lush green fields that greeted him every morning is now a distant dream, replaced by a desolate landscape of withered plants and barren soil.
Jutee and his fellow farmers in this town told the Liberian Agricultural and Environmental Journalists Network that they might back off farming activities because they have become a waste of energy over the last few years.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 20 to 40 percent of global crop production is now lost to pests, especially insects, worms, and bacteria.
"These pests are our worst nightmare. We spend a lot of resources and time making these farms just to watch our energies being wasted. We cannot continue to suffer with empty pockets," Jutee said in a very frustrated tone.
Farmers across Liberia have already been facing the effects of higher temperatures and erratic rainfall, which have made their work difficult, but the pest infestation, which experts attribute to climate change, seems to be the worst situation facing the farmers in this town.
Theophilus Bah, an expert and agronomist with the Transformation and Agro-Business Revitalization Project (STAR-P) at the Ministry of Agriculture, recently told New Narratives that changes in rainfall patterns can lead to pest and disease infestation.
In 2023, the National Disaster Management Agency named pest infestations one of the four disaster incidents recorded across the country.
The NDMA gathered information on pest infestation in fifty-four towns and across six counties- Lofa, Nimba, Rivercess, Gbarpolu, Bong, and Bomi, respectively. It described pest infestation as "an emerging hazard in Liberia.
During the last caterpillar invasion in late 2022, Scientists from the Central Agriculture Research Institute (CARI), with support from the Bong County authority, started responding to the pest invasion by carrying out chemical spraying exercises across some Districts.
Some of the Districts affected by the exercise are still experiencing pest infestation. However, the exercise did not reach Kpaymue.
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"They can eat the entire leaf of our crops and later start on the trees. If they come to your farm for three days, yours is finished because you will not get anything from there again," says Julie.
Despite threatening to quit farming, Jutee has no other source of income as he has depended only on crop farming over the past 30 years. With a family of 12, Jutee would give another try for the next farming season but with the support of experts and farming tools to battle the pests and their infestations.
Francis Coleman, a Plant and Soil Scientist at CARI, feels the struggle of the farmers in Kpaymue. He says most of the farmers are suffering from pest infestations because they lack knowledge about safeguarding their crops.
"Our farmers need to be educated about several things. Most of them do not know what causes these things. You will agree with me that the lack of crop rotation, which involves planting the same crop in the same field season after season, can lead to an accumulation of pests that target that specific crop. Another major issue is inadequate pest management practices.
Because they lack real knowledge, farmers improperly use pesticides and outdated or ineffective pest control methods, which leads to what we are talking about today," Coleman says. He has promised to write a proposal to the Ministry of Agriculture that would ensure support for the training of farmers in these areas and also make available the needed materials for them.
Liberia is not the only country in Africa facing pest infestations. The Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International says crop losses due to insect pests across the continent are estimated at 49% of the expected total crop yield each year.
