It is tragedy that there is food insecurity in The Gambia today because this serious problem is highly solvable. After all, the country has all the right conditions for its solution in a reasonably short time period and definitely within the first term of any serious administration. What the country needs is the right leadership and ability to competently execute a sound plan.
The Adama Barrow government’s announcement that it will achieve rice self-sufficiency by 2030 is both laughable and sad. It is laughable because it should be clear to all by now that this government cannot achieve rice self-sufficiency even by year 2040. It is sad that even after 7 years in power, this government believes that it still needs another 6 years – a total of 13 years – to achieve something that should have been achieved in 5 years or less.
To believe a government’s promise of addressing any goal, it must not only have a track record but also it needs to provide a credible plan rather than spouting a mere claim. Furthermore, the plan presented must not represent a repetition of past policy failures that did not achieve any results. Did the Barrow government’s recent announcement of its goal of rice self-sufficiency through the Minister of Agriculture come with any actual plan?
Achieving rice self-sufficiency requires understanding all the constraints that we have in the rice value chain and role of the various stakeholders. Along all segments of the value chain, there are different kinds and degrees of challenges. Each of these challenges have different degrees of difficulty, as well as needing the appropriate stakeholder that is best place to address them. The nature of these challenges will require the appropriate sequencing of solutions.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus on two key challenges that the government is best placed to address. These are land reforms and irrigation infrastructure. Incidentally, these challenges are located in the upstream segment of the value chain. The more upstream one goes in the value chain, the more significant the constraints. Furthermore, the more upstream the value chain, the bigger the role of the government in addressing the constraints.
Paradoxically, one of the biggest impediments to rice self-sufficiency is land. On one hand, there is no shortage of land in The Gambia since one does not need more than 20% of our arable land to meet our domestic consumption need if only we can reach Senegalese level of rice yield. On the other hand, just because land is physically there does not mean it is ready to be put under cultivation. Specifically, there are significant plots of land situated in almost ideal agro-ecological conditions in CRR and URR that are currently inaccessible for willing agribusiness firms for a number of reasons.
Among the reasons why vast amounts of land that are highly suited to rice agricultural production but are inaccessible at the moment includes parcels of land held up in disputes between communities. These parcels of lands that are lying unproductive could be used by private agribusiness firms but the missed opportunity persists simply because the current government has not been able or willing to play the role of an honest broker between the relevant parties. It is major abdication of responsibility. Unfortunately, the future of land reforms looks bleaker than ever given the fact that Hamat Bah is in charge of a ministry that is tasked with coming up the country’s land policy. I have little doubt that the resulting land policy document that will be produced will be well drafted. Unfortunately, the problem will be with the operationalization of the policy given the current leadership.
Another important determinant of rice productivity that is lacking in The Gambia is irrigation. And unless it is adequately addressed, there is no hope for rice self-sufficiency. Given that this requires capital-intensive infrastructural investment, the government is best place to handle this on a large scale because it is a public good. It is more than a tragedy that the country is still lacking in irrigation infrastructure when there is a freshwater river running through the middle of half of the country and the government is wasting money on unproductive activities. The construction of canals would unlock significant amounts of land that can contribute to not only to greater rice production but also that of other key cereals and horticultural crops.
Given the country’s flat topography and the limited presence of rugged terrain, canal construction costs in The Gambia would be lower than most places in the world.
In addressing both land availability and irrigation solutions, one has to think carefully about the minimum quantity of cultivated land that would be needed to completely meet our domestic consumption needs so that the scale of the challenge can be appreciated. Specifically, local rice production must target a minimum of at least 350,000 tonnes of milled rice per annum, which translates to about 460,000 tonnes of paddy rice per annum. Then, a realistic yield can be targeted that would indicate the quantity of land to be developed so as to achieve rice self-sufficiency in the country.
Putting this in context, one can see how uninformed and completely out of his depth the current Minister of Agriculture, Demba Sabally, is when he recently addressed this topic. Minister Sabally made the strange claim that the Gambia would achieve rice self-sufficiency by 2026. As you digest that wild claim, please keep in mind the following. The country currently produces only about 10% of the rice we consume. We also have the dubious distinction of having the lowest rice yield in all of Ecowas, with no more than 1 tonne per hectare.
According to a press report, Minister Sabally also made some reference to irrigation funding that he claimed would be forthcoming. The amount of land that would supposedly be irrigated by donours is less than 5% of the current size of land under cultivation. How does that square with the claim that the country could achieve rice self-sufficiency in just two years if Minister Sabally knows what he is talking about?
If Minister Sabally is to be taken seriously, he should have mentioned something about the actual investment in irrigation undertaken by the government that would be complemented by donour financing. After all, in the last budget, there was no significant allocation to irrigation development. To underscore how Minister Sabally and his boss are incapable of addressing this problem, he repeated precisely what has been done over the past years in the Gambia, which predictably led to no results. Specifically, Minister Sabally spoke almost exclusively about donour assistance. Whenever you hear a government official talk about waiting for the arrival of a donour-funded project in other to implement a strategically important activity, you will save yourself a lot of time by simply tuning off.
A Korean-funded irrigation scheme, or for that matter, any donour-funded program in agriculture will have the same eventual fate like the Jahally Pacharr project. This is because when the period of funding expires, the attention it gets from the government also ceases. All the attention from officials will now shift towards the next funding opportunity, and as a result, the older projects get completely forgotten.
Minister Sabally made no mention of the issue of land and important role it would have to play in achieving rice self-sufficiency. His superficial mentioning of irrigation betrays his lack of knowledge about the sector and his lack of seriousness as a leader. His limited understanding on how to reach realistic rice yields removes all doubts about his suitability for the important role of the Minister of Agriculture. More importantly, it shows the leadership failure of President Barrow at the State House, who ultimately decided that this is acceptable leadership for such a strategically important sector. Rice self-sufficiency in The Gambia will have to wait for a new and different leadership in the country.
