Where Are They Now?… Amanda Klarer Is In The Field In Cameroon  

Amanda with the baby named in her honour in Kwakwa.Photo  supplied

Amanda with the baby named in her honour in Kwakwa. Photo supplied

Celia Hunter

Farming, food production, sustainability: all words, issues and concepts that have a vital but everyday feel to them for us in this part of rural Ontario.  For Amanda Klarer in Cameroon, West Africa, they are equally vital issues, but the everyday feel is not quite the same.

Amanda is currently finishing up a study centred on cacao production in and around what she calls the village of Kwakwa.  In fact, the village includes about 6,000 people, and no one believes her when she says that the village she comes from, Millbrook, is much smaller.  Laughing, Amanda claims that she’s “more country than the people here”.

When she first arrived in Kwakwa, there was no electricity in the village.  Everyone had phones though, which would be powered up by generators.  This meant that people gathered together to share stories and talk about their day while they waited for their phones to be re-charged.  For Amanda, this was a great way to get to know people and learn something of the area.  About a month and a half after she arrived, electricity finally arrived.  The transformation, Amanda says, was extraordinary and immediate.  For the first time, people were connected to Facebook and email.  The friendly gatherings around the generators were over.

Farming was not what Amanda had in mind when she put her interests in travel and the environment together and embarked on an undergraduate program at Dalhousie University in Halifax in Environmental Science and International Studies.  By the time she graduated in 2009, and had spent a summer as a visiting student and environmental researcher in Malawi in southeastern Africa, she had first-hand knowledge of the social and economic impact of agricultural development on small, traditional family farms in developing countries.

Amanda has been living in Cameroon since late April, completing research for her Masters degree in sustainable development of agriculture .  Known as Agris Mundus, the two year program is based in Montpellier, France, and trains students in current global/international concerns in agriculture and rural development.  She is doing field research on the history, dynamics and strategies of how farming is carried out and the effects of cacao production  on food crops.

Arriving in Kwakwa, Amanda was partnered up with a Cameroonian student.  The intent, in part, she says, was to help introduce her to local culture and conditions, as well as help with the research, but as it turned out, her male partner was born in the city and found adapting to the rural conditions much more difficult than she did.  He has recently returned to the city to take exams, leaving Amanda to continue the project.

The Agris Mundus program is oriented towards tropical, developing countries.  In Cameroon, cacao production is “big business”.  It is a major economic driver.  The soil, says Amanda, is incredibly fertile, but more and more land is going to cacao production.   Amanda’s research takes her out into the cacao plantations where the men of the village work for one of the large international corporations that supply the world’s appetite for all things chocolate.  She also works with the women who tend the small plots of land that provide the food for their families, and take any surplus harvest to market. As the only white-skinned person in the village, and as a woman, she has had to overturn a few preconceived ideas on the part of her hosts.  She explains that the definition of monogamy in local society, when it is practiced, is quite loose.  She tells her hosts about her fiancé in Peru.  Whatever they may think of this long-distance arrangement, they are won over, to the extent that recently a baby born in the village was given the names Amanda Klarer in her honour.

While in Cameroon, Amanda is busy on a second project: participating in developing a film that celebrates the importance of family farming.  There are about 40 students in various regions of the world taking part in this production called Agriculture Familiale – Le Film.  It isn’t surprising that Amanda has an eye for capturing images and scenes that tell a story.  A graduate of the PCVS Integrated Arts program, her artistic side is evidenced in the oil paintings that hang in her parents’ home.

Amanda leaves Cameroon this month, returning to France to complete her studies and write her thesis.  While fluent in French as well as Spanish, she is relieved that the thesis can be written in English.  This will shorten the writing time, which is important, because Amanda is ready to come home.

Amanda says she doesn’t know where her Masters degree will take her but hopes to be closer to home for a while.  She is particularly interested in urban agriculture and in research, but is keenly aware that job opportunities are hard to come by.

Travelling has been what Amanda has been doing for the past five years.  After graduation from Dalhousie, she travelled through North America and then south as far as Argentina, by land.  In Peru she taught English and met the man she looks forward to marrying next year.  Her Masters degree has included studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, and on projects in various regions of France as well as in Malaysia and Morocco.  But Amanda says that she misses Canadians.  When she meets a fellow Canadian, she says, “I feel at home”.  And home she will be, in time for Christmas.

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