Case study Sorghum growing in Sierra Leone 58. Development support At Heineken, local operating companies are free to implement policies that best suit the needs of the local community in which they operate. In the West African Republic of Sierra Leone, an ambitious new pilot project was launched in 2005 to help small farming communities cultivate high-quality sorghum for the local Heineken brewery as a partial cereal substitute for imported barley. The aim of the Sierra Leone sorghum project is to provide local farmers with technical expertise and income stability that will ensure high-yield harvests each year and also to provide the brewery with a steady flow of raw material. The project has been welcomed locally and is being implemented with the help of a non-governmental organization of local agronomists and scientists belonging to the Community Biodiversity Action Network (CBAN). Sierra Leone is a predominantly agricultural society that is slowly emerging from a bitter nine-year civil conflict that ended in 2001. While rich in mineral resources and farming potential, a lack of basic infrastructure, low levels of investment and entrenched social poverty have historically hampered the nation's attempts to develop its economy. Ivan Carrol, a Heineken consultant and former general manager of Sierra Leone's main brewery located in Freetown, the nation's capital, has spearheaded the sorghum project since March last year. This initially involved the task of approaching some 1,000 farmers from the northwestern coastal districts of Port Loko and Kambia and encouraging them to organise into cooperatives. Carrol says the main obstacle has been to earn the trust of local farmers and to convince them to move into full sorghum harvesting. Sorghum has never been grown commercially in Sierra Leone, he notes, and has only ever been a subsistence crop that is grown in combination with others, such as rice and groundnuts. "Encouraging them to grow a 100 per cent sorghum plantation has been an enormous risk for farmers who were very sceptical about whether we would follow through on our word to buy the harvest at a fixed rate in cash," says Carrol. "Over the years they've heard so many promises from overseas non-governmental organizations that never delivered. They often asked us: 'how do we know you will ever come back again?' Carroll set out to build trust by paying regular visits to each of the collectives and reassuring them that Heineken was committed to purchasing the final harvest. Meanwhile, CBAN was actively engaged in showing farmers how to make proper use of pesticides to remove weeds and better administer the land to enhance their yields and produce a crop with the right moisture content and purity. Manual harvesting and threshing began in December 2005 and took three months to complete. By the end of January 2006 all participating farmers had received their payments for bags they had processed. Our final target is 150 metric tonnes of high-quality sorghum seeds - a number that is expected to grow exponentially next year as the farmers will become more experienced with the crop. Sowing of the next sorghum crop begins in May with the first of the heavy rains. As truckloads of new seeds make their way to the farming plantations, Carrol says the project is already a living example of how a major international company like Heineken can work at a local level with small communities in a way that is mutually beneficial. "It's been a tremendous success all round, both for Heineken and for the farmers of Sierra Leone and we've learnt a lot about how to manage a project as ambitious as this one," says Carrol. "The farmers now know Heineken is committed to this project and is a company that can be trusted. I'm getting calls from more growers wanting to join in." Heineken N.V. - 2004/2005 Sustainability Report

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Heineken - Milieuverslag | 2004 | | pagina 60