Interview: Agriculture Minister on food sufficiency

President Ernest Bai Koroma says agriculture is a priority for his second term. So when Politico caught up with Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Dr Joseph Sam Sesay, we started by asking him about the current state of affairs in relation to food sufficiency in Sierra Leone. Dr. Sam Sesay: There has been significant improvement in the first period of the tenure of His Excellency the President, Dr Ernest Bai Koroma from 2007 - 2012. Key indicators are that in the first place, out of international assessment we normally try to determine the hunger period; that is the period during which food is very difficult to get in Sierra Leone; essentially it happens during the rainy season, the period of cultivation. We inherited three months; now it is virtually gone less than a month of that period which means that significant improvement has taken place in terms of food availability. Secondly, another very typical indicator is the cookery shops. Before we used to have a lot of imported foods being cooked but now we see a lot of domestic rice and people prefer domestic rice because of nutritional values; the calorie is stronger and it has more calorie than the imported and local rice with fresh harvest, whiles the imported rice takes a number of years before it gets here and so quality wise it’s not as good. You also have other indicators: when you look at the rice self-sufficiency and rice is a staple food in Sierra Leone, we inherited a sixty-one percent level of rice self sufficiency. Today we can talk about over self-sufficiency; the problem we have though is structural in the sense that we have problems of processing and moving produce from producing areas to the market through feeder roads that we have problems with. Secondly we also have the problem of smuggling. About ten percent of our food goes to neighboring Guinea and Liberia which means that the food which should have been available in Sierra Leone moves away to other countries simply because they are fetching better prices and simply because the roads are bad inland so they move across the border especially along the riverine areas where it takes you about five to ten minutes across nearby markets in neighbouring countries where you sell and have a better price. So, these are some of the challenges we are facing but the situation has significantly improved overall.   Politico: When you say the situation has significantly improved, has that had an impact on the price of imported rice which one would say it should have affected if there was a real availability of rice in the market. I mean locally grown rice? Dr. Sam Sesay:  Yes, you have what is called demand and supply; eh market forces, simply whether it is food or any commodity. That is the demand versus the supply really determines whether the price would go up or not. Now, if supply increases significantly as I have mentioned in terms of rice self-sufficiency for example, it means that it is now satisfying the demand and therefore there is not much pressure and therefore we would expect the price to go down. This has been the trend. We have studies, monthly market surveys country wide, which really have shown that the price of domestic rice has been going down. And to the extent that the margin, the differential between the imported and that of the domestic is very close now or virtually the same. Even though the price of the domestic rice was high, now it is moving towards the price of the imported rice. Which means that because of the increase in supply which is virtually satisfying demand the pressure on food has gone down that is demand and therefore the price is fairly stabilizing so that is the situation we have now.   Politico: You say that locally-grown rice has more nutritional value than imported rice. That being the case why do you think people buy imported rice at a higher cost if there is real sufficiency of rice grown locally? Dr. Sam Sesay: Well actually it is the contrary. The domestic rice is more expensive than the imported rice; I can sight two examples why. The first is the quality and the nutritional value of the domestic rice which fetches what is called premium compared to the imported rice. Imported rice, the taste, the kilo calorie and so forth. So all indicators of quality and nutritional value the domestic rice is more and therefore it fetches premium. But there is also the negative side of it that affects the price; some of these structural problems - the cost of transportation is very high because of the increase cost of fuel. If the roads are bad it takes you longer to travel or you have less traffic to move commodities then you would expect an increase in the cost of the commodity because all of this affects the price of the commodity. And so that structural problem itself creates some amount of inefficiency in the agricultural value chain that makes it a bit more expensive. If the roads are good and also the cost of production has gone down because; if fuel price and so forth is stabilize and labour cost is also fairly reasonable then eventually it would reflect on the price of the commodities. So, inefficiency as a result of these problems is affecting the price of our domestic rice. Politico: Then how does that explain the fact that a global food security survey puts or ranks Sierra Leone at 94 out of105 countries? Dr. Sam Sesay: Well there is a misnomer somehow in terms of that global indicator; the fact being that the majority of the pointers or the indicators within that relate to health and poverty, which are not exclusively agriculture but when you talk about hunger you straight away think about food and that is the misnomer mismatch. Most of the things I think you may have I can’t remember now maybe two indicators or so that relates to agriculture, but the balance has to do with child health and have to do with poverty so, these are collective indicators that is various sectors would have to contribute. I mean you know the complexity of poverty, poverty is not just about food, poverty is about income, affordability, how much are you earning that can enable you to have the purchasing power to buy food. Food can be available but if don’t have the purchasing power, your salary is low you can’t buy it even if it is there. So these are problems that are not agricultural that is the misnomer about that indicator. Politico: Ok the President has prioritized agriculture. Initially he was looking at infrastructure and electricity and recently he has moved towards agriculture. How is that factoring into the budget? Do you think your Ministry has what it needs in terms of the annual budget? Dr. Sam Sesay: Definitely there has been a significant increase in the allocation, budgetary allocation to agriculture from a paltry 1.6% we inherited in 2007 to a current near 10% which satisfies the 2003 Maputo Declaration in which all Heads of State and Government of Africa agreed in Mozambique that they must commit 10% of their budget to agriculture and they must promote annual growth rate of 6% of the sector for agriculture and many other things. And so Sierra Leone met this condition by 2009, the 10% budgetary allocation. However, we still face some problems of access, adequacy and timeliness: access because it is cash based economy; budget, we depend on the revenue, which fluctuates and also the donors that provide the budgetary support are not regular and adequate in their support to the budget, it is not coming on time, not the amount that we expect. It is affecting access; and also affecting access are the bureaucratic processes to get the money; the paper work before it gets to Finance before they clear it takes a long time, sometimes a number of months according to my calculation, sometimes four to five months, or five to seven months depending on the form of procurement process which most of those access to finances is passed through. So that is affecting but also timeliness is affecting our use of the funds. Agriculture is time bound an operation that is supposed to do in January if you don’t have the funds to start that you would have lost the year almost. And adequacy, adequacy in the sense that if you are allocated 10% please let me have my ten percent and so these are some of the problems but we have tried our best as a government. Politico: So are you implying that the 10% which is earmarked for the Ministry doesn’t get to meet the Ministry? Dr. Sam Sesay: Well it does. It has. We struggle a lot. What is happening now in management of the budget now is we have what is called carry-overs; simply put debts. We have committed funds last year under the budget last year supposed to be paid last year but because of what I had explained it is not done. So what happen is that we have outstanding debts to satisfy come the next year budget you have to pay off. So yes, eventually we would end up having a 10% but as I said time is the issue so you have an overlap of budget. Politico: What’s the plan with all this invigorated approach towards agriculture? What’s your next plan? You have been reappointed by the President. What is your plan in terms of the coming years? Dr. Sam Sesay: Well first and foremost, I think we started a very good job we have constructed Agricultural Business Centres, the ABCs for short which comprise of infrastructure that houses storage, milling, processing marketing facilities, etc and then also you have water wells and pumps and other things infrastructural facilities. We also have agricultural machinery, power tillers, rice cutters, rice threshers, rice mills, cassava graters; you have improve inputs such as fertilizers, high yielding varieties of rice and cassava and so forth. All of these constitute an ABC, now if you can imagine that package and five KVA generator if you can imagine that package within an ABC and currently we have one or two ABCs per chiefdom in the country I think that’s an huge investment and people are really seeing it. These are not white elephant; people are really seeing that in their chiefdoms they have this package which is boosting agricultural production actually. So we need to reinforce that building the capacity of farmers, and their groups to manage those ABCs as a business, farm for business. It is no more an issue of livelihood just because it is a way of life. No! It must be business in the sense that you are making money so that you can offset your cost of production or whatever and have profit like any business and live a life that is worth living as an investor. So that is where we are moving agriculture now. And so we are going to transform those agricultural business centres into limited liability companies just to operate as full scale formal private sector because agriculture about 95 percent is an informal sector and you know what that mean if it is formularize through this limited liability companies it is revenue for government, it is a way of helping them to access like loans and other things so it would help. Even for the records for statistics; so that is a very massive movement we are going to be engage in. But we would also step up on the issue of promoting large scale private investments especially foreign direct investment that we now witness since 2009 when I passed through Cabinet the incentive package for private sector investment in agriculture which has a good number of large scale investment in agriculture be it sugar cane, oil palm, rice production, you name it. These are two prong approaches boosting small scale commercial agriculture for the small holders but also promoting large scale agricultural activities in the country. Politico: Finally, all of that sounds pretty good and eventually if it works, it means that there is going to be an increase in the yield. But earlier you spoke about some of the challenges facing the production of food in the country particularly in terms of hemorrhaging of produce to neighbouring countries, the poor conditions of feeder roads, etc. With all these brilliant ideas if these things are not addressed it will more or less be in the same place. Dr. Sam Sesay:  Yes and this is the challenge that we have to face. We cannot afford to reverse the trend, the positive trend we have witnessed which has won us international accolades. We are also going to engage government I mean His Excellency is committed but every now and then we need to remind that we keep to our international obligations such as the Maputo Declaration. But another thing we have done and would continue to do is to promote feeder roads as I mentioned the structural problems of access from producing areas to markets have to do with the feeder roads. Today agriculture is undertaking the rehabilitation of feeder roads about 98% of the feeder roads in all of Sierra Leone are done by agriculture. We plan, we find money and we give contractors to do that job. Secondly and another important one is access to finance; the farmers have continue to be subsistence because they don’t have access to finance to be able to undertake commercial agriculture. Today because of that you see that if the commercial banks give loans to 100 people according to statistics, only four would be for agriculture, 96% would be for trade; you know this short-term turnover things which the banks are interested in by the way because when they give to traders two or three months, they pay back and imagine if they are charging twenty-five percent in two or three months; they pack back that is one turnover. They can make three turnovers times twenty five percent; that is, they can make 75% and that is why they are interested in business and not agriculture. Agriculture takes a longer period to pay back six months, 12 months; so there would be only one or two turnovers so that is why the commercial banks  by their operations are not interested much in agriculture but there is a change now anyway. But nonetheless, we cannot wait for that change we have decided to promote village and community banks which in their own operation they are being owned by farmers, by rural communities through shareholding; they buy the shares, they owned the banks and govern them, and secondly, they also loan out monies to themselves and the interest rate is around 10% and it takes a longer period and the conditions of collateral no, no no, is  none traditional operations which makes access very high. And these banks we are going to construct countrywide; virtually every district now have this and it has helped farmers a lot. So these are some of the strides we would push on. Politico: How do you ensure that the food is not taken to neighbouring countries? Dr. Sam Sesay: Well, there must be a collaborative effort that is an area with the Ministry of Trade and Industry. I would be engaging my colleague Usu Boi.  I have already told him the results of the surveys that came out with very disturbing news that about 7,000 bags of rice are being exported from Barmoi Luma alone to Guinea every month. And if you look at the season of five months then we are talking about 35,000 bags. That’s a lot. The same thing goes for Gari, for kola nuts and also for palm oil and many other products. And so we would have to work with the Ministry of Trade. We would have to work with NRA, the Police and Office for National Security. These are all stakeholders in that process to ensure. We are not saying “stop export” but “do it legally”. Politico: Thank you very much Mr. Minister Dr. Sam Sesay: Thank you. Transcribed by Tilly Barrie