By Linus Aleke, Abuja
The Senator representing
Bomi, County in the Liberian Senate,
Edwin Snowe, Jr. said the people of West Africa must go back to the soil, invest in the soil and have the necessary yield, to guarantee food security in the sub region.
He also noted that food insecurity is worst than other form of insecurity, as hunger and starvation is one of the factors that trigger social upheaval and fuel criminalities.
Snowe Jr who is also the Leader of the Liberian Delegation to the Community Parliament of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), identified other causes in an interview with Thisday in Abuja.
He said: “Food Security cannot be addressed through an event or programme where quick and beautiful speeches would be made. It has to be a practical reality where people have to go back to the soil, invest in the soil and then we would have the necessary yield. That is better than talking and doing nothing”.
Noting that that a hungry man is an angry man, the Liberian MP, said leaders and other critical stakeholder in West Africa need to move away from rhetoric to walk the talk.
According to him, “We need to create opportunity for farming, we need to deliberately invest in farming. At the ECOWAS bank for instance, we need to have a section for agriculture investment. The return on investment in agriculture in West Africa is very high. I am a farmer myself, I have over a thousand hectare of oil palm plantation in Liberia and I can tell you the cost of a bag of fertilizer, especially since the crisis in Ukraine has quadrupled. So, there are challenges and I think that we need to invest in agriculture”.
Snowe Jr said that other factors that fuels insecurity in the region, include marginalization, unemployment, drug abuse, where people get high on all manner of substances and loose control of their sensibilities.
The ECOWAS Parliament Committee Chairman on Political Affairs, Peace, Security and African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), noted that
there are lot of factors that play into these situations.
He further noted that until W/Africa takes control of its destiny, in solidarity amongst themselves as brothers and sisters, the more the situation will continue to deteriorate.
He explained that, “Most times the people that are on the forefront of these crisises in West Africa and elsewhere are not on their own, they take instructions from people they don’t even know, some times third or even fourth party. They are just there to implement instructions that they don’t know how it was arrived at. They don’t know what they are doing. We need to focus more on youth empowerment and education, job creation and the issue of drug abuse is playing a major role in escalating these multifaceted crisis confronting the sub region”.
