By Fatou B. Cham
Rice cultivation has begun in earnest in the Building Resilience Against Food and Nutrition in the Sahel Project (P2RS) project intervention sites of Misera, Nyantanlleh and Jahallyare.
The Gambia predominantly practices rain-fed agriculture and the rainy/farming season officially begins in May/June.
The Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Amie Fabureh, with a delegation comprising officials from the Central Project Coordinating Unit (CPCU); directors from various departments, and the team from the Ministry of Agriculture, very recently embarked on a visibility and monitoring tour of the project intervention sites in the West Coast Region (WCR), Lower River Region (LRR) and Central River Region (CRR) respectively.
Shedding light on the project, ShiekhTijan Sosseh, the officer in charge of the P2RS, said it is almost over five years now. He informed that the project was supposed to be accomplished in five years but that it suffered some delays due to loss of lives of project managers and some other challenges in the implementation process. “Delays were also caused by contractors, supervising engineers, as well as issue regarding disbursement. If the Ministry of Agriculture had not taken the robust initiative to transfer the management of the project to the CPCU, we would have flagged it as a failed project,” he affirmed.
Mr Sosseh narrated that when they took over the project, they invited contractors, went to the field, and reviewed the existing implementation mechanism of the activities. It was only then, he noted, they were able to earmark the challenges that were causing all those delays and came up with a framework to that effect.
Namiakuru Dansira, Farmer at Misera, CRR, expressed appreciation for the Minister’s visit to the rice field to get firsthand information on how the work is going on in the rice fields.
She however requested the procurement of a second tractor to fast-track the work on the rice field.
Haruna Gassama, President of Jahally Rice Field Association in Jahally, said they used to rent tractors from Cassamance, Senegal to plough their rice field. Nonetheless, he attested that Agriculture ministry has addressed that issue by ploughing all their rice fields at no cost to them farmers.