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