MISAJE, CAMEROON – Women and children with logs of wood on their heads emerge from the forest in Misaje, a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon.
The women and children collect wood to cook their meals and also to preserve their harvests, says Margareta Nkenda, a farmer in Misaje. Nkenda preserves her maize and other crops using traditional methods.
“Growing up, my grandmother taught me how to farm and also how to preserve our food traditionally,” she says, “and that’s how we do it.”
Preservation is crucial because Nkenda cannot afford to lose the food that she works so hard to cultivate and to harvest.
“I work very hard year-round to cultivate maize for consumption and for sale,” she says. “It is always very painful to [lose] any, especially after harvest.”
Nkenda’s main preservation technique is to store the maize in the “banda,” the Cameroonian Pidgin English term for a traditional thatched kitchen ceiling. She then lights a fire on the ground in the kitchen under the maize to dry it.
“We use a lot of wood and burn so much wood because our village is a hot place,” she says. “If we don’t burn as much wood as we do, the maize will get bad. When the maize is well-dried, we store it well away from rats and pests.”
She is satisfied with the results she gets from her traditional preservation methods.
“I have some success with the method of preserving our maize because somehow I can have maize that will last for up to a year,” she says. “I have even taken my maize to local agric shows and won awards for it.”
But she faces pressures as a modern farmer that never confronted her grandmother, and the threat of post-harvest loss is always present.
“Traditional food preservation is not new,” she says. “Even the problem of food loss is not new. However, today, we have a challenge, which is to store more food in ways that we can consume at home and sell some. I am cultivating more than our parents did, and there is a challenge preserving all the harvests in such a way that I don’t [lose] any.”
For every 3 metric tons (3.3 short tons) of maize that Nkenda harvests, she sometimes ends up losing 1 metric ton (1.1 short tons). On top of that, she occasionally sells her remaining maize for cheaper for fear of losing even more.
She has heard from peers and has learned from extension workers that there are more effective preservation methods, such as modern cribs, dry houses and silos.
A maize crib is generally a raised structure with slatted walls where farmers store and dry ears of corn. A dry house or drying house is a building specifically for preserving maize or other grains. Both can be modern or traditional, depending on the design.
Nkenda and the farmers in her area use traditional bamboo cribs, but they cannot afford the costs of setting up modern preservation structures, she says.
In Cameroon, most rural farmers still use traditional food preservation methods, which are frequently ineffective at preventing food loss. Inadequately preserved food can also lead to health risks for consumers. Farmers say they cannot afford to employ more modern practices, and experts comment that governmental and nongovernmental efforts to install new preservation structures are not always relevant to rural farmers’ needs. Nongovernmental organizations and the government are offering trainings on how to improve the traditional methods of food preservation, but farmers say they still need more access to capital to implement what they learn.
Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year – or approximately 1.3 billion metric tons (1.4 billion short tons) – is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
In Africa, 15 to 30 percent of grains produced disappear because of post-harvest losses, according to data that the African Development Bank Group presented at a 2010 workshop on post-harvest losses in Africa hosted by the FAO and the World Bank.
In Cameroon, where maize is one of the main staple foods and also the preferred animal feed, up to 40 percent of the maize produced is lost post-harvest or during processing, says Boukari Ayessaki, senior adviser for value chain development at the SNV Netherlands Development Organisation, an international nonprofit development organization. This level of maize loss leads to lower incomes from the sales of dry grains, as well as food insecurity at the household and community level, according to a 2012 study the organization commissioned.
Bah Salifu Ndichengoh is a large-scale maize farmer in Ndop, a town and commune in the Northwest region of Cameroon.
Depending on the farming methods and seeds he uses, a hectare (2.5 acres) of land on his 20-hectare (50-acre) farm can produce 3 metric tons (3.3 short tons) to 5 metric tons (5.5 short tons) of maize, he says. But he is only able to sell a fraction of this.
“Of this harvest, sometimes I lose up to 2 tons in harvest and post-harvest operations,” he says, which is the equivalent of 2.2 short tons.
Although he uses some modern preservation techniques, such as storing much of his harvest in modern cribs, most farmers rely on traditional methods.
“In our community,” he says, “technology and infrastructure to help us preserve and store our harvests is limited. Most people resort to traditional methods [of] preserving by drying in their bandas or using cypress leaves to keep weevils away from the maize.”
Ayessaki says that most Cameroonian farmers’ post-harvest operations, though affordable and accessible, are inefficient. Traditional processes – apart from those that include chemical treatment – expose harvests to insects and rodents, and farmers consequently lose important quantities of their crops.
Inadequate preservation methods also create health risks.
SNV surveys with farmers in the Northwest region of Cameroon found that because of flaws in post-harvest maize operations, at least 30 percent of the consumed or sold portions are usually of poor quality, Ayessaki says. Prolonged consumption constitutes a threat to the health of consumers.
Charity Kawira Mutegi, a food scientist whose work focuses on food security and who is the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2013 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, says that improper preservation can be deadly.
“One of the major concerns for maize farmers and consumers in Africa is aflatoxin, a poison produced by fungus, which occurs when the grains are not dried properly,” she says.
In a 2008 study, researchers from Cameroon’s Institute of Agricultural Research for Development found other types of fungal toxins in Cameroonian maize, which they attributed to poor handling, packaging and storage practices.
To prevent health hazards as well as waste, modern preservation methods would seem to offer a solution.
But most rural farmers cannot afford to put modern preservation methods in place, says Peter Tanyi, the divisional chief of agricultural development in the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development for the Donga Mantung division of the Northwest region, one of the main maize-producing basins in Cameroon.
For example, a modern crib that is 10 meters (30 feet) to 15 meters (50 feet) long and one meter (3 feet) wide can cost up to 1 million Central African francs ($2,000), he says.
Ndichengoh has a modern crib but says he lacks access to better methods, such as a silo. The government and nongovernmental organizations sometimes construct silos for local farmers’ use, or farmers do so themselves if they can afford it.
But even in places where modern methods of drying and storing maize exist, they may not be relevant or accessible to most farmers, Tanyi says. For instance, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the FAO built a silo 20 years ago in Donga Mantung that local farmers have never used.
Silos are mostly for large-scale farmers, Tanyi says. Most rural farmers are small-scale farmers and so cannot make use of large structures such as silos unless they merge their maize together. But when small-scale farmers try to share the same silo for preservation, it is difficult to determine later which maize belongs to which farmer.
“How will you sort out the maize after it’s dried to give back to each farmer the quality or quantity of maize he brings to the silo?” Tanyi asks.
Ayessaki, the adviser from SNV, says governmental agencies and nongovernmental organizations often offer programs or projects to communities without considering what aid would be most relevant to the community.
“My advice is that often donor organizations and governments should do feasibility studies to determine real needs of recipient communities,” he says.
Today, the government does study the needs of a community before implementing new projects, Tanyi says.
In the absence of modern methods of maize preservation, improved traditional methods are a viable option, Tanyi says.
“Traditional food preservation methods cannot be ruled out,” he says. “In spite of its shortcomings, they can be improved upon and modified to meet current needs and challenges.”
For these improvements, Ayessaki recommends that small-scale farmers use traditional cribs for storage. Modern cribs are too expensive for many of these farmers, but they can build smaller cribs using cheaper materials such as bamboo. Farmers can also prevent loss and damage to crops by better timing their planting and harvest periods.
Ayessaki's organization trains maize farmers on capacity building and best practices. It modifies the trainings for farmers according to their capabilities and geography.
“We have been carrying out such training in the field taking into cognizance the specificities of the agro-ecological zones of the intervention areas,” he says.
Chia Isaiah Toh is an official at the National Program of Support for Maize Sector in Cameroon, an initiative of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The program, which began in 2010, educates maize farmers about best practices for cultivation, harvesting and post-harvest maize operations, among other initiatives.
But even with the trainings, small-scale farmers need better preservation methods, Toh says. This is now the governmental program’s focus.
“The project also works to address the limitations of preservation technologies and infrastructure,” he says, “and these are our priorities now and for the future.”
Ndichengoh says there has been a lot of training available recently on preserving food, fighting food loss and increasing crop production. He learned how to construct his modern crib from SNV and from extension workers from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Then, he used his own funds to build it.
The crib has helped, but it has not ended his post-harvest losses, he says. In order to succeed as a farmer, he needs more than just training. With a loan, he would be able to do mechanized farming and buy modern food preservation technologies.
“Training is good,” he says, “but once we have the knowledge, next question is if we are viable enough to implement it. With all my extent of farmland, I have to do mechanized farming, but it is very expensive.”
He suggests access to credit to supplement training.
“Getting loans from financial institutions is such a difficult process,” he says. “If we had easy access to credit and more support from the government, we will be able to produce more and [lose] less.”
Ayessaki says the government, nongovernmental organizations and small-scale farmers must collectively address the limitations in grain and food preservation knowledge and technologies among farmers to achieve tangible reductions in food losses.
Meanwhile, Nkenda, the small-scale farmer in Misaje, says she will continue to make do with the traditional preservation methods she knows until she has access to better technologies.
“Thanks to the methods of preservation which we learned from our grandparents and parents, we have some hope that what we cultivate will not be lost,” she says.
Mary Wairimu of GPJ’s Kenya News Desk contributed to the reporting of this article.
This story was written with the support of The African Story Challenge @AfricanMediaInitiative.
