Thousands of farmers receive farming aid

Some 10,530 low income rural families in Sierra Leone have received farm implements and inputs that promise to end hunger as the country emerges slowly from 10 years of civil war, PANA reported. The chief agricultural officer, Dennis Kamara, told PANA in Freetown on Tuesday that the farmers had received tractors, power tillers, seeds, tools, and other agricultural inputs, including 11,000 bags of sweet potato vines and 8,000 bundles of cassava cuttings for the current planting season. The donations were made by the Chinese and Swedish governments, as well as the FAO and other international NGOs. Despite its mineral wealth, Sierra Leone’s economy is largely agricultural with between 64 percent and 75 percent of the population earning a living out of this activity. Up to 70 different crops have been cultivated but the main export crops are coffee, cocoa, palm kernels and piassava (a fibre crop), cola nuts and ginger. Cocoa accounts for about 45 percent of total agricultural exports. Before the civil war in 1991, some three-quarters of the farmers cultivated the staple, rice.