Sierra Leone Preserving Culture

543 Words2 Pages

On one side of the world, people are stuffed and overfed. Many of these people are not even directly involved in agriculture. If you look right across the ocean—particularly Sierra Leone—you can see that people are starving. Two-thirds of the population is reduced to subsistence farming and many have to trek dangerous fields just to obtain their food. Civil war has brought devastation to the developing country and as a result, its economy crumbled. This made rice, their staple food, become a rarity.
Without the food product they have been consuming over decades, they starve. Joseph Sam Sesay, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Agriculture, has suggested that rice should be replaced with other crops like sweet potatoes. Replacing the rice with …show more content…

Unfortunately, like replacing food products, it also comes with underlying issues. The construction of infrastructure may provide access to markets and help in the long run, but the amount of time required to build it causes the country to crumble even more because all resources have to be allocated to the infrastructure. On top of that, Sierra Leone still lacks the money and technology to properly maintain the new constructions.
These solutions lead all have two conflicting problems: preserving the culture or saving the lives of the people. Having one leads to the loss of the other. When you account for Sierra Leone’s refusal to change, it is clear that preserving the culture can be the only solution. Yes, it may lead to a drastic loss of life. But, if you choose not to preserve the culture, the people of Sierra Leone would rather let themselves die than to accommodate to the new changes.
This is one of the reasons that has led other nations, including the United States, to send rice to Sierra Leone just to keep the country alive. In turn, Sierra Leone has developed an overdependence on foreign support. The rice sent most likely gave Sierra Leoneans the notion that rice will always be available and further reinforced their belief that rice should not be

Open Document