Urban farmers in Liberia battle hunger

SINKOR, Liberia

As this small West African nation slowly recovers from the ruins of war, city dwellers such as Wata King battle the ever-present threat of hunger with a growing cottage industry - urban farming.

Liberians are planting vegetable gardens on street corners, in abandoned lots and along the sides of roads in Sinkor and other communities on the outskirts of the capital, Monrovia.

The high cost of rice - about $30 for an imported, 110-pound bag in a country where 80 percent of people are unemployed - has reinforced a “back to the soil” initiative launched last year by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

It has been more than five years since decades of misrule and ruinous civil war ended. Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president inherited a country reminiscent of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Hundreds of thousands had died and millions of refugees fled their homes.

Mrs. King, 50, said that hunger sometimes swells in her belly like the hellish sun above.

“You go and come back. You come with nothing. You feel too sorrowful when you coming. The children expecting you to come, bring food for them,” she said in the local English dialect. “I could drink water, but the children … sometime I can’t bring food at all.”

About two months ago, Mrs. King began growing a garden of leafy greens on the roadside across from her dilapidated concrete house.

Most city gardens are filled with potato greens - a leafy plant similar to the collards popular in the U.S. Deep South. Potato greens can be grown from a plant stem placed in the ground, making them an easy and inexpensive vegetable to farm.

Mrs. King planted her greens as an experiment to see whether she could generate some extra income and put more food on the table for her family of six.

“Not every time you have money to buy,” she said.

So far the experiment has been fruitful.

She’s replanted three times and made a little extra cash, with help from her daughters, Beauty and Mima. Together, the King women plan to expand the vegetable garden along the city right-of-way.

The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) stopped mass emergency food distributions to displaced Liberians in 2003. But it continues to nourish thousands of Liberian children in about 2,100 primary schools through its school feeding programs. Most of the schools are in remote areas, but about 300 schools in the capital city were added this year to combat hunger stemming from rising rice prices.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Liberia next week as part of an 11-day tour of seven African states.

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