SAMAY, Liberia (AlertNet) - In a village surrounded by forest to the east of Liberia's capital, women sing as they dig rehabilitated swampland to make way for rice, the country's staple food.
The women of Samay are part of a growing number of farming groups that are being advised by experts to turn to lowland farming to enhance crop productivity, enabling them to produce enough to be able to sell their surplus.
The aim is to help tackle food shortages in a country battered by 14 years of civil war and heavily dependent on food imports.
"We didn't usually work in swamps before but the people who have come to help say we can have three yields in one year on such plots," said Jemama Flomo, spokeswoman of the women's farming group in the village of Samay, 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital Monrovia.
"We are very happy to work on the swamp because we are short of food."
Despite progressively improving food production in post-conflict Liberia and favourable agro-ecological conditions, the United Nations says agriculture productivity in Liberia is still low.
Rice imports accounted for 60 percent of total consumption in the year to May 2008 in a country where the farming population is dispersed, rainfed crops are farmed with small machinery and processing is limited - all of which heighten the country's vulnerability to international market shocks, according to the U.N.
Liberian subsistence agriculture is traditionally based on burning bushes on slopes for farming but experts say it is in the interest of the government to encourage farmers to use the country's more than 560,000 hectares of swampland.
"While the yields in uplands range between half to one metric tonne per hectare, in the lowlands (swamps) it is between 2.5 to 3.5 metric tonnes per hectare under traditional farming and should you adopt improved methods of farming you could take it to 5 metric tonnes per hectare," Sheku Kamara, a food expert delegated to support the farmers by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told AlertNet.
"In addition, the hills are exposed to all sorts of degradation as people cut the trees and burn each year before farming and move from the land after two years, causing erosion and turning some of the forests to grasslands," he said.
MORE LOCAL PRODUCE, LESS IMPORTS
Under a 13-million-dollar European Union food facility to tackle the food price crisis that hit Liberia in 2008, U.N. agencies and the country's ministry of agriculture have been promoting the rehabilitation of swampland, irrigation schemes and dams which had fallen into disrepair as part of medium-term measures to revitalise the agriculture sector in the country to ensure food security.
The FAO provides agricultural inputs including rice seeds, fertilisers, pest management products and training on improved methods of farming while the World Food Programme trains the farmers, especially women, to process the grains and then buys the surplus to use in its school feeding projects in Liberia.
"Where we want to see them down the line in 3 to 4 years is to be able to displace the imported rice in the Monrovia market and flood it with local food to be able to feed their people," said Lansana Wonneh, an expert with the WFP in Liberia.
This goal could be difficult to reach, however, if farming remains as labour intensive and with such a heavy burden on women who also have to continue to perform traditional roles such as mother and care giver.
At the swamp in Samay, the 64 farmers all said they needed power tillers and other equipment to cultivate the large farms they are now working on in a bid to produce more.
"If we want to improve agriculture in the long term, it is time to introduce modern technology and we should be thinking of tractors. One thousand hectares is not a small area - it requires a lot of labour," Wonneh told AlertNet.
For the moment, the women of Samay are pleased they can grow their own food and even make some extra money - although this comes at a cost. The work is very physical and they do not have boots to protect their feet and legs from leeches.
"During the war there were people who were helping us," Flomo said, referring to the aid workers who helped with agriculture in camps for the displaced. "But now the war is over and we need to do something for ourselves to get more food."
(Editing by Katherine Baldwin)
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