Liberia Agricultural and Environmental Journalists Network (LAEJN) Promote informed journalism and public engagement on agricultural and environmental nalists Network (LAEJN)
By: Joseph Titus Yekeryan
KPAYMUE, Bong County – 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 on grounds that it has become a wasted energy for 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 amongst others.
“These pests are our worst nightmare ever; we spend a lot of resources and time to make 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 effect of higher temperatures and erratic rainfall that have made their work difficult, but the pest infestation which experts attribute to climate change, seems to be the worst situation to face by the farmers in this town.
Theophilus Bah, an expert and agronomist of the Transformation and Agro-Business Revitalization Project (STAR-P) at the Ministry of Agriculture recently told New Narratives that the changes in rainfall patterns can lead to pests and disease infestation.
The National Disaster Management Agency in 2023 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 on 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 here in Kpaymue.
“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 Jutee.
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 infestation as a result of their lack of knowledge in safeguarding their crops.
“There are several things our farmers need to be educated about. Most of them do not know what causes these things. You will agree with me that the lack of crop rotation which has to do with 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 do not have the real knowledge, farmers improperly use pesticides, they use outdated or ineffective pest control methods which lead 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 to also make available the needed materials for them.
Liberia is not the only country facing pest infestations in Africa. The Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International says crop losses across the African continent due to insect pests are estimated at 49% of the expected total crop yield each year.
