Why grow lettuce? : agricultural production policies being implemented in Koinadugu District, West Africa

Abstract: "Continued failure to effectively implement policy wastes increasingly scares resources and undermines the prospects of sustainable development" (Brinkerhoff,1395)After a decade long civil war ravaged the country, Sierra Leone faced the challenge of rebuilding its broken infrastructure, social disconnect and food and health inadequacies. With approximately two thirds of the population residing in rural areas and engaged in subsistence level agricultural activity it is estimated that 70% of the total population lives below the poverty line. Food insecurity continues to plague the nation as 26% of the populace are deemed as food poor. In accordance with the president’s declaration of eliminating hunger and alleviating poverty, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security (MAFFS), with the support of various UN agencies, is implementing the national food security policy initiate; Operation Feed the Nation (OFTN). Supporting Pillar II of Sierra Leone’s Poverty Reduction Strategy (SLPRS), promoting pro-poor growth for food security and job creation (in a healthy macro-economic environment) and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1 and 8 eradicating poverty and hunger and developing a global partnership for development, OFTN looked to stimulate agricultural sector reform. OFTN seeks to generate economic empowerment through ‘building farmer capacity to produce, process and market more crops, livestock and fisheries while developing community capacity to form organizations which will facilitate small enterprise development and marketing efforts. This thesis argues thus that GoSL, in implementing initiatives such as OFTN , will risk failure if it does not look at the process by which OFTN is being implemented. Furthermore the argument will propagate that all too often there is more of a focus on the stating and proclamation of the policy rather than the process of how it is being implemented. This process in policy implementation acknowledges that to implement is just as political as it is technical, it is fused with complex relationships between agents meant to enforce them and agents meant to benefit from them. Through the narrative policy analysis, this paper will explore how the formulated agricultural production policies through OFTN are being implemented at the grassroots level of a chosen rural District located North East of the country in Koinadugu. The narrative accounts of all the agents involved in a specific OFTN response project will be presented; the Food Security through Commercialization of Agriculture (FSCA). In addition, existing discourse on the policy to practice/implementation process will be presented.