The global outbreak of Coronavirus Disease in 2019 and its continued manifestation to date, around the world, has impacted negatively on the Gambia’s tourism sector as hotels, restaurants and other places of interest to tourists and other visitors, bear the brunt of the pandemic due to business meltdown foisted on them by the ravaging virus.
The resultant effects are loss of jobs and incomes because several employees of this vital sector of the economy were laid off, thus rendering them jobless, especially the youth folks.
One Bubacarr Camara of Sintet village in Foni Jarrol District of West Coast Region, is one of those who lost their jobs in the hotel industry, and he had to devise another means of earning a living by transitioning from being a waiter to vegetable gardener in his native village since 2020.
As Mansa Banko Online reporter Yerro S. Bah writes following his WhatsApp interview with Camara, the Grade Nine (9) dropped out said his father was never in support of western education which forced him to leave schooling at that level of education, and became a waiter for the past 15 years.
The waiter-turned-gardener now grows vegetables and plant (fruit) trees in his garden while aiming to become, in his words, ‘the biggest farmer’ in West Coast Region. His main setback, he claimed, is the breakdown of his generator last year, few days after his crops started flowering and cropping– which eventually had a negative bearing on the crops and vegetables in his garden.
According to him, his life has changed for the better since he started gardening; that he has achieved self-employment which, he said, is ‘better’ than anything. “I ventured into farming because it was part of my dreams since primary school days,” the Sintet villager told this medium.
“There is going to be progress in my vegetable farming in the next five to ten years,” Camara ambitiously charged.
He, however, disclosed that marketing of farm produce is a national challenge as the middlemen dictate the prices for farmers, pointing out that marketing of his garden produce in the village is too slow and whenever he takes his crops to Brikama, he sells them at cheap prices to the middlemen, otherwise the crops would get spoiled if he should return with them to the village. “I have no choice but to sell at the mercy of the middlemen,” he sadly echoed.
The former hotel worker explained the pandemic had taught him a lesson, in that it encouraged him to return to the village to take up farming since hotels were shut down for too long. He further argued the Covid-19 has helped him in another way to muster the courage and venture into agriculture; and now he believes he can’t quit it anymore for hotel work. Reason: “I can’t work for monthly salary now.” Camara works in the garden with his wife, describing her as ‘supportive at all times’.
The message he wants to send out is that, Gambians should embrace agriculture, especially the youth, stressing agriculture is the only rapid means to poverty reduction.
