Indigenous Food Crop Protection Methods and Their Implications for Food Security in Rural Cameroon

Food insecurity poses a serious problem in most rural communities in Africa where the majority of the population relies on subsistence agriculture as their primary means of sustenance. Preventing crop loss and failure is crucial for ensuring food security in rural areas of Cameroon. This can be accomplished through the use of high-cost risky pesticides and insecticides increasingly being used for food crop protection in rural Cameroon. However, a more reliable approach is to rely on low-risk and cost-effective indigenous methods which offer crop protection strategies suitable for the farmers. The preferred choice of most farmers in rural Cameroon is the use of various types of traps (animal, human, spiritual), deterrents such as wood ash. This qualitative study examines the various indigenous techniques employed by farmers in one community in rural Cameroon to safeguard their food crops. Our findings suggests that despite the increase in the use of pesticides and insecticides, the farmers still suffer from pests and crop loss. Given the effectiveness of indigenous practices in protecting and preventing crop loss and crop failure, there is a growing need to document, validate, and possibly integrate them with contemporary agricultural science and technology to ensure their long-term viability and continued contribution to food security in rural Cameroon.