60 years after Gabon's independence, agriculture is struggling to take off

Audio 02:25

By: Yves-Laurent Goma Follow

Gabon is celebrating this Monday, August 17, the 60th anniversary of its independence. Sixty years later, the small oil emirate has failed to feed its population. Almost all food products are imported from neighboring countries. Europe and Latin America supply frozen meats and poultry while Thailand floods the country with rice. Sixty years later, why has agriculture not taken off? What are the prospects for the future?

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Come and see fruit and vegetable market. Antoine Moussavou came to stock up. He recognizes that almost everything that is sold here is imported from Cameroon:

“  The 80% of the products we see there are imported. We see tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, peppers, ginger,… Mainly from Cameroon. "

According to the FAO, Gabon spends more than 360 billion FCFA each year for the import of food products. The situation has been going on for decades. Economist and former Minister of Agriculture, Raymond Ndong Sima has an idea about the failure of agriculture in Gabon:

“  Here agriculture is the epitome of what Dutch disease is. We have a raw material, oil, which caused a rise in prices and which severely penalized agriculture. At the same time, the agricultural projects that we have had and which, I must remind you, have been strongly recommended to us by consulting companies, in particular French companies that we have paid for at a high price. These companies built the project on raw material valuation price assumptions that did not materialize. And of course the consequences were that these projects ended up collapsing and dying one after the other. I believe that it is more than 700 or even 800 billion FCFA that Gabon has invested in these projects.  "

On the plate of Gabonese, there is daily rice imported from Thailand. This strong dependence revolts the researcher Yonnelle Moukoumbi Déa. For 3 years, she has been conducting research in Kougouleu, 60 km from Libreville, on rice seeds adapted to the soil and climate of Gabon.

“  We have to learn from all the failures and we did indeed realize that the bottleneck was the seed. We are therefore obliged to work on quality seed because it alone accounts for more than 40% of the production,  ”she explains.

Yonnelle is convinced that Gabon can become a rice exporter:

“  Very sincerely, if Gabon invests seriously and sincerely in the rice-growing activity, after 5 to 6 weeks, we will become self-sufficient, even by exporting.  "

Yonnelle's dream is still a long way from reality. The political will is lacking. The Gabonese are still very attached to the comfort of offices.

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