After claiming thousands of lives in West Africa, the Ebola epidemic seems to be bringing about another urgent crisis: a food emergency, according to agriculture ministers from West African nations who added that financial aid and medical assistance will be required to prevent the disaster.
With more than 900 deaths in Sierra Leone and thousands of confirmed infections, about 40 percent of farmers have reportedly abandoned their fields since the recent outbreak of the deadly virus, said Joseph Sam Sesay, minister of agriculture, forestry and food security, at the World Food Prize Foundation annual meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, where government, academic, corporate, nonprofit agriculture and food experts gathered to discuss issues of hunger and boosting agricultural productivity.
A region in the country, where about 90 percent of the coffee and cocoa beans are exported agriculturally, has been struck the hardest, the Associated Press reported.
"Farms have been abandoned. Some families have been wiped away. Some villages have been wiped away. It is very serious," Sesay said, according to AP. "We have to understand that agriculture is the mainstay of our economies. If agriculture is down our economies will be down."
Until Ebola struck in May, the Sierra Leone's economy was expected to grow more than 11 percent this year. Since the outbreak, however, it is being predicted to be around 3 percent, he said.
Similarly, the decimation of farming in Liberia has caused billions of dollars outside of agricultural investments to go to waste said Liberian Agriculture Minister Florence Chenoweth said.
"Liberia expected 9 percent economic growth but has ratcheted it down twice to about 2 percent," Chenoweth said, according to the AP. "The nation had attracted $17.6 billion of foreign investment of which $7 was for agricultural development but those investors have left, she said, adding that a recovery plan has been developed."
"We are very determined, very resilient people," she said. "We have not as ministers of agriculture put forward a recovery plan for nothing. We will implement that plan ... and rebuild our country's agricultural sector."
Meanwhile, regional trade is also being restricted, which could eventually "lead to a hunger crisis of epic proportions for West Africa," said Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a United Nations agency based in Rome
"It is unfortunate that the international community does not look up to crises when they occur in what I call the forgotten world, the invisible world where people die in rural areas from drought or disease until it grows out of proportion or until it begins to effect the larger international community," Nwanze said. "When there's a crisis in Timbuktu it doesn't stay in Timbuktu anymore. Nowadays it reverberates in Paris, London, Berlin and Washington."
