The Director General of the Central Agricultural Research Institute, Dr. Victor H. Sumo, inspires a batch of interns from the Tubman University in Maryland County, Nimba University in Nimba County, Booker Washington Institute in Margibi County, and Zwedru Multilateral High School in Grand Gedeh County, to lead the change they want to see.

The team of nine students from Tubman University are all from the College of Agriculture while a batch of 29 from the Zwedru Multilateral High School are from the departments of agriculture, business, building trade, automotive, home arts, construction carpentry, and electricity.

In a welcoming statement, Dr. Sumo thanked the students for the long journey to the research station and encouraged both the team and their sponsors to remain engaged with the various heads of departments that they have been assigned for advice and mentoring.

Dr. Sumo indicates that the field of agriculture has taken a new dimension fueling industrialists and confectionaries with raw materials from milk for candies, farm animals for dairy products, cotton for textiles, natural rubber for the auto industry, palm oil for cosmetics, biofuel and energy, and many more products are derived from the science of agriculture. “There is no one country in the world that has achieved so much development without prioritizing agriculture, so when we talk about development, it starts from agriculture.”

Making specific reference to the students from Tubman University who are reading agriculture, they were advised to build small teams comprising of males and females to establish agribusiness firms or entrepreneurship because, in this way, they will not only be giving back to their communities but will also strengthen the rural economy and provide employment opportunities for the underprivileged and less fortunate.

In the case of industrialization, the Director General emphasizes that agriculture is important and cannot be ignored because industrialists need a regular supply of raw materials in order to make things work. “Without regular supplies of needed material to work, you cannot open a textile industry that is dependent on the supply of cotton materials to get the industry moving; you cannot have a meat factory that is also dependent on livestock, confectionaries for chocolate products and biscuits to also work; we have milk as a major product from our dairy farms, palm oil for cosmetics and biofuel, and others.”

“More importantly,” he maintains, “in the pharmaceutical industry, nearly 40% of medical products come from the agriculture sector, this includes mushrooms that are grown in other countries to feed into the industry to produce the penicillin drug which is now a big factory, as well as wood for furniture from the logging industry, or agroforestry that concentrates on removing meaningless forests and planting species of trees for valuable wood for construction engineering and shipbuilding, etc.”

Dr. Sumo adds: “Universal agriculture is not concentrated on feeding people, it is now concentrated on nutrition, not eating for eating sake, but eating for what is in it now that will help the body to build up the body.”

Providing further guidance to the interns, Dr. Sumo says when one talks about nutrition; one has to work with the medical industry, which of course has to do more with agriculture. “If we help you with the information to guard you properly to eat the right thing at the right time, you will spend less on chemically made medicines, you will live longer, and politically, when human resources, the most precious resource of any nation, and so if you have a population that is living longer, that means more taxes, more persons on the job market and more income to the government.”

He indicates: “I do not know what to say about the agriculture industry that politicians will take seriously. At a regional conference, all West African member states were mandated to allocate at least 10% of their annual budgets, or of their GDP, to the agriculture sector of their countries because that is the new awakening, because if you do not wake up, the pharmaceutical industry will not wake up, the auto industry will not wake up, the textile industry will not wake up, and the confectionaries will not also wake up. We got no choice, whether we like it or not.”

Dr. Sumo cautions the interns to be cognizant of the importance of the agriculture sector and avoid sending applications for jobs when in fact they can be their own employers. “As we are speaking here today, you should not be sending job applications anymore; we are at a new level, a new thinking, and take the risks. Forget about mistakes and learn from it and move ahead. The little mistakes that you make, the more experienced you are. There is no failure in research because your literature will guard the next person who wants to pursue similar initiative.

According to him, when one visits the supermarkets cross the world, about 98% of everything that are in the supermarkets are from agriculture. “Everything you see there, whether wine, whisky, apples, juices, biscuits, bread, chicken, cow; anything that you see there. How many supermarkets in Liberia, and how many supermarkets around the world; agriculture is a multi-trillion-dollar industry, it is agriculture that feeds all the supermarkets whether vegetables, tobacco or onions, garlic, ginger and so forth.”

He further maintains that with the technology of distillation, people are changing everything that is derived from the agriculture sector, including rice wine, rice gin, maize, and even vegetable oil from corn, beans and sunflower. “Can we sit down and let the country alone, no, we cannot sit down. The country needs innovators, not people that will go apple for jobs all around. We need a group of young people to start a company or consultancy.”

In bees keeping or apiculture, he reveals that honey is extremely beneficial to plants and mankind because of the health and nutritional benefits. Additionally, the agricultural benefit of honey as the universal pollinator is that it pollinates and transports the nectar. “Honey is the reason why we have fruits, and honey is the main reason that we have universal diversity, sitting on flowers, using their hairy legs to transport pollen grains from one flower to another, pollenating form place to place.”

The challenge in Liberia is food processing, post-harvest and value addition, packaging, and expanding the job creation chain. 

Commenting on behalf of the students, the coordinator of the office of internship placement at the Zwedru Multilateral High School who accompanied the students, Mr. Alexson C. Dennis lauded Dr. Sumo for affording the students the opportunity to learn from the scientists and technicians at CARI.

Mr. Dennis remarked: “These are students, the good thing we did is that we left our pride home and we came here to learn, so, anything you want us to do, anything that you think a student can do to advance his/herself, we are willing to do that.”

Mr. Dennis also used the occasion to call on CARI for future collaboration to establish a demonstration site and a hub for seedlings at the Zwedru Multilateral High School to supply local farmers in southeastern Liberia.