By Alieu Amara Suwu
In the quest to boost the Feed Salone project, Sierra Leone, in teamwork with the Technology for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), and Sahel Consulting, is hosting a National Seed Business Summit today, September 18, 2023, which will end on September 20 in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital.
This year’s summit, themed “Building a Roadmap for Seed Sector Transformation,” seeks to propel Sierra Leone towards an economically sustainable rice, cassava, maize, and soybean seed system. The summit is expected to uplift the voices of value chain actors impacted by the cassava, maize, and rice seed systems by sharing success stories from the global south on increasing the availability of climate-adaptive, improved, and disease-free seed to improve farmers’ livelihoods. It is believed that the summit will also provide the opportunity to share seed development experiences from DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania, etc., and TAAT’s and BASICS-II’s value propositions for scaling and replicability to other African countries where cassava, maize, and rice play significant roles in income generation and food security.
The three-day seed summit, which aspires to catalyze the realization of the Sierra Leonean Government’s agricultural policy goals through seed sector development, is poised to raise awareness on the role of quality seed in agricultural transformation, share best practices in building sustainable cassava, maize, soybean, and rice seed systems, and develop value propositions to achieve the government goals.
Speaking to journalists in a press conference held on September 16, 2023, Dr. Alfred Dixon, Director of IITA/TAAT and Country Rep, Sierra Leone, said the Seed Summit is an essential one because food has to be produced that creates wellness, and to get that going in a positive direction, they have to start with seed, for high-quality seed is the foundation of productivity, and high-quality improved varieties of seeds give about 40% of productivity.
Dr. Dixon said the conference held was apt and recalled that when President Bio attended the Dakar summit, he committed to food sufficiency. However, Dr. Dixon said they should not be talking about food sufficiency but food sovereignty because food, as a security concern, cannot be left in the hands of strangers. He confessed about issues with the seed system in Sierra Leone; hence, they have to work on it because it improves productivity. He said the summit will set a road map and strategies for seeds as the basis for productivity.
Dr. Toyin Adetungi, IITA/TAAT Value Chain Specialist, said for them in TAAT, they have been working in Sierra Leone for a while and have done some assistance on cassava, rice, maize, and other short-term projects. Dr. Adetungi, on the food chain, said they are concerned about the sustainability of interventions, how they can manage the seed system, and how they can achieve food sovereignty. In doing so or to achieve these, they have to look at the quality of seeds, the sustainability of the seed system so they will be able to project dividends coming from their intervention, the quality of the product, marketing sustainability and sale value, the quantitativeness of the product generated from seeds, the competitiveness in terms of products generated from the seed, and how the seed given to farmers can be traced. She said part of the summit is to be able to put together a robust seed system so that the youth can be involved in seed production, and she assured that the youth will put in their energy and more, and then they will have a sustainable food system in Sierra Leone. She further states that the summit will equally chart the path for seed sector development guided by a seed roadmap that will boost the supply of quality seeds of climate-resilient and market-preferred varieties to respond to the growing needs for food and industry in Sierra Leone and advocate for more investments in sustainable cassava, maize, soybean, and rice seed systems for economic prosperity, including job creation and access to affordable foods.
Prof. Lateef Sanni, Project Manager, Basic 11, IITA/TAAT, shared experience of cassava production in other countries and added that Sierra Leone is not new to cassava production because cassava has been produced in different varieties, such as cassava bread, etc. Dr. Earnest Asiedu, as a rice specialist, shared his experiences in terms of rice production in other countries.