Moving youth and women subsistence farmers from shifting cultivation and bush burning to organic market gardening.
In cognizance of the GPA’s Vision and Mission we owe a responsibility towards engaging, empowering-equipping the youths and women subsistence farmers to enhance resilient profit as well as a resilient planet and as such enhance a balance between the competing (and most often conflicting) values of socially responsible initiatives, environmental performance and economic rationality. To attain this core organizational commitment GPA engages youth and women farm groups into organic market gardening management – providing capacity skills enhancements, land preparation, tilling, seed selection/preparation, organic manure preparation, planting, nurturing, mulching, weeding, harvesting, storage and marketing.
Shifting cultivation has been a typical form of rural subsistence agriculture, in which a piece of farmland is cleared of vegetation and cultivated for a few years and then abandoned for a new area until its fertility has been naturally restored. Meanwhile, Bush burning is the act of setting forests, weeds and grasses in uncultivated farmlands on fire. Sometimes weeds or grasses cleared from farms are gathered haphazardly and burnt. Most farmers engage in this practice as a way of clearing their farms in preparation for planting. Shifting cultivation and bush burning for agriculture are the most common agricultural practices engaged by the over 80% of the rural population of the NW region of Cameroon that is engaged in subsistence agriculture.
From 2016 (despite the Anglophone Crisis that interrupted most of our activities) we have been able to move 180 youths and women from shifting cultivation and bush burning for subsistence agriculture to organic market gardening. Despite several challenges involved in this transformative process the results have proven that communities are receptive to Market-based instruments (MBIs), which are practices that utilize markets, price, and other financial incentives and economic variables to reduce or eliminate unintended environmental impacts which economists refer to as negative environmental externalities
While GPA lost its entire 20 hectare agricultural/fishery projects at the agricultural estate in Kendem, Tinto Sub-division (through an intentional fire disaster by the Anglophone Non-States Armed Groups), we have set up pilot projects within the poultry sector comprising; production of broilers, three weeks old, the traditional African chicken, Turkeys, ducks, and Geese. We hope to expand it to greater dimensions.
