SAVE OUR RURAL AREAS! Part 1

A desolate and long abandoned place with a health unit lacking  even the most basic of  of all drugs and equipment, a market square with the number of shades  in use on a typical market  day far outnumbering  the number in use with many in ruins –abandoned by youths for greener pastures in town and a population  living in conditions that violate their basic human rights. This is the picture  I have since returning from  a trip to my village  after more than 10 decades of absence 2 years ago. with little or no hope  of ever knowing the grandeur it had known before and slowly but surely dieing  dieing


Bafmeng( my village) might be one of the  most economically backward  and socially challenged  villages in Cameroon, it is far from  being the worst-there are communities in a worst shape compared to this village.


But things in my village have not always  been so.When I visited Bafmeng during my summer holidays in 1998, the picture of desolation, abandonment, and seeming hopelessness  described above, was far-fetched  because economic activities-mostly carried out by youths –were booming and all shades in the market occupied. Community clean-up campaigns and other socio-cultural  activities  were the order of the day.But that was then!


The effects of the economic crisis which hit Cameroon in the early 90s were surely still to be felt in Bafmeng  up to the year 2000 when the village felt a pinch of the crisis.
this is after Cameroon had implemented its austerity measures and the Structural Adjustment Plans imposed  by the world bank  and and the International Monetary fund.The neglect of rural areas led to the impoverishment  of rural areas  and their inhabitants.This is were it all began.


The neglect of rural areas and a lack of strategies  to develop and open up these areas which are of strategic importance to a country like Cameroon which still has about half its population  living in these areas greatly contributed to the declining food production,unregulated and uncontrolled urbanization, high crime wave in cities, pollution, prostitution,early marriages, unregulated births, increasing  number of school drop outs, and child child trafficking which is so rampant in Cameroon.

Our rural areas are in prolonged comma from which they must be rescued so as not to die.They are agonising and slowly dieing without anybody raising even the smallest finger and need the care attention and treatment required to bring them back to their flamboyant and vibrant youthfulness of the  pre-independence era.



But how can this be done?, one may ask. Saving rural areas from their agony requires more than just good intentions on the part of policy and citizens.It requires well thought and carefully designed policies which not only aims at improving the life of rural area dwellers but  making these areas attractive. This could be done only if the greatest cause of rural area decline is tackled-rural exodus.

51.3 percent of Cameroonian live town while 49.7 percent  of which 43.5 percent are of ages below  15 and 51 percent of rural area dwellers are women. This is the trend in most developing countries  especially since independence where youths  young men and women with dreams of  living more decent and satisfying lives than their parents, and aspirations of living in free and modern world are pushed to the move to the cities where they think all their dreams and aspirations will be met. But when this dreams are shattered by the lack of opportunities in town they  resort to drug abuse, alcohoolism,crime and prostitution.


Rural exodus, rather than cosmetic changes  made by Cameroon’s government by creating more schools and universities in town to cater for the influx of people from rural areas  is thus the problem to be solved if rural areas are to be revamped  and agricultural production increased to meet the current shortage  which  in February 2008 led to riots and unrest in the country by youths.

The solution to rural exodus is simply turning its push factors into pull factors for rural areas so that we can get an urban-exodus. These factors will be examined in the second part of this reflection.

AGRICULTURE:ULTIMATE WAY OUT OF POVERTY Part 2.

Poverty is no doubt one of those concepts  for which a description  is easier to give than a definition.This is because  poverty mean a whole lot of things to people around the world;what is poverty  to a European could be opulence  in other parts of the world for instance.

It is a truism that  a unique and universal  definition of poverty  will be very  difficult to get.But that is not my concern in this article. I am more than convinced that  if each and everyone of us  makes it his/her point of duty  to fight against what he/she perceives to be  poverty, we will end up  having  a world with poverty at its barest  minimum. In this article I present my perception of poverty and how I think this could be best tackled.

A world bank report of  2006 has noted that for any development to be sustainable, accent has to be placed primarily on ensuring that every mouth is sufficiently fed.This  report advocates that nutrition  has to be central  to all development initiatives. The views in this report had earlier been expressed by Fawzi-Al Sultan, one time president of the International Fund for gricultural Development(IFAD)  in  the following words:

A proper attack on  hunger requires  a real partnership  to deal with obstacles  the hungry  face, principally as producers, for the poor are rarely simply poor, they are poor farmers, poor fishermen, poor herders.

When I read the above words  from the proceedings  of the International Conference on overcoming Global Hunger. I jumped from the  my chair  and  said to my self, “Atlast, I have found  an approach to tackling poverty that is most suitable   for my country Cameroon and all other developing countries”

In Cameroon, One is not said to be poor until when he/she cannot  eat to their fill-the size a person’s dish is the main  indicator of status in  the rural part of Cameroon from which I hail. Hunger  in my part of the world is  highly viewed as the  starting point of a vicious cycle  that ultimately leads to death because a person who cannot eat to his/her fill will without any doubts  not have the means to pay for health bills when they are  sick, and will not even have the strength to think about  how to send  his/her children to school, talkless  of having any financial means to sponsor their education.

A person struggling to survive a famine or whose sole concern is what he will feed himself and his family with will rarely have even a passing thought on the effects his actions could have on the environment  for present and future generations as all that matters to him is to find a means to survive. Where I come from such persons are those considered to be poor and earmarked for death as it is not just hunger but also poverty that leads to the death of a person.This is because a person who has no contribution to make to society  is considered dead.

Concerning the right path to the eradication of poverty, Much has been said and so much more left unsaid; so many finger have been pointed, some in the right direction and others in the wrong direction.But this does not mean we should give up the search for a more inclusive, more sustainable, and more-people oriented approach to this fight. Going by my people’s perception of poverty, it is no doubt that the adoption of a more-agricultural and rural areas oriented approach to tackling poverty by governments and other stakeholders of developing countries like Cameroon whose rural areas plays host to more than half of its population and whose agricultural sector despite its abandonment and neglect still accounts for a very significant portion of its GDP and absorbs a great number of its working force.

In the next few weeks, I am going to outline the importance of the agricultural sector and rural areas in the fight gainst poverty in my country Cameroon and end up with concrete proposals on how this could be done.