Sierra Leone loves rice and wants to free itself from imports. But how to do it?

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FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — The rice border lies on Sierra Leone’s sacred frontier. People say you haven’t eaten at all, unless the meal includes rice.

But as prices rise, consumers in the West African country are giving up other food items to buy them. This is the main reason why 83% of the population is food insecure, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

In the capital, Freetown, nail technician Anima Manjula, 28, carves through rice with cooked cassava leaves. “I would eat rice five times a day if I had the money,” she said, even as its price more than doubled this year.

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Not everyone can keep up, she said, and “people are struggling.”

Experts blame the high prices on heavy reliance on imports, which provide 35% of Sierra Leone’s rice needs and consume $200 million annually in foreign currency.

Although West Africa has a long tradition of growing rice and is often excellent places to do so, experts say import dependence is due to a lack of investment in agriculture, booming population growth and cheap rice imports from Asia.

Sierra Leone’s Minister of Agriculture, Henry Kbaka Musa, accused the International Monetary Fund of pressuring Sierra Leone in the 1980s to stop investing in agriculture and open its markets to imports as a condition for obtaining loans.

“We were exporting rice,” Kabaka said in an interview.

Now he and President Julius Bio plan to do it again. The government raised more than $620 million from international development banks this year to work toward food self-sufficiency, particularly in rice, although Kabaka estimated the plan would cost $1.8 billion in total. Experts from the Ivory Coast-based think tank Africa Rice praised the plan as “ambitious and forward-looking.”

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But NGOs and academics warn it will favor international agribusiness and large-scale farms, at the expense of the country’s 5 million small farms. They point to similar failed attempts to achieve food self-sufficiency in places like Burkina Faso and Ghana.

Challenges and potentials of self-sufficiency

West Africa has an ancient tradition of rice dating back an estimated 3,500 years. Historian Judith Carney said its farmers were taken as slaves to work on plantations in the southern United States, leading to a booming rice economy.

Sierra Leone has the best climate and land in the region for growing rice, with abundant annual rainfall in coastal areas.

But Minister Kabaka highlighted the obstacles to achieving self-sufficiency in rice: poor roads linking rice-growing areas to markets, unreliable electricity for processing it, climate change, and poor access to finance.

With financial support from development banks, he approved plans to improve roads to the country’s three main “rice basins,” create large areas of irrigated land and provide fertiliser, seeds and pesticides to smallholder farms.

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He said: “The plan begins with infrastructure to attract the next private sector.” He promoted the plan to unspecified international investors, offering them thousands of hectares of irrigated land.

But some believe smallholders, who make up 70% of the country’s 8 million people, will be a step down.

The view from the field

Abubakar Kwa, an agricultural leader in the Bo region, brought together others to discuss the rice challenges they face, which also include access to land and lack of capacity for storage, training and processing.

They were united in their lack of optimism about government aid. They’ve heard these ambitious plans before.

“We are not getting support from the government,” said Eric Amara Manet, a smallholder and village leader.

The most common concern was the lack of labor needed to create irrigated fields. Clearing vegetation and digging canals is laborious, and the exodus of young people to urban areas means farmers have to hire workers – a cost beyond the reach of many.

Despite high unemployment rates in cities, Manet said young people prefer easier jobs such as driving motorcycles and taxis.

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Some farmers have formed associations to share the work, but poor tools slow progress. In one government-backed project in Bo, it took 82 people three months to dig 60 hectares (148 acres) of canals.

Cautionary tale

Sierra Leone’s goal of bringing chemical fertilisers, seeds and pesticides into the hands of smallholders aims to replicate Asia’s Green Revolution, which has increased rice production by more than 100% in two decades.

But Clara Fischer, a professor of rural development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who specializes in sub-Saharan Africa, warned that this approach exposes farmers to agribusiness giants such as Bayer Crop Science and Syngenta.

An initiative called Green Revolution for Africa. It, with support from the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and others, has spent more than $1 billion since 2006 to increase access to fertilizer and seeds for smallholders, but its own evaluation in 2022 said it had not led to increased food security. This initiative supports Sierra Leone’s efforts.

A recent evaluation by the German Development Ministry in Ghana and Burkina Faso found no evidence that providing fertilizer and seeds increased yield or profit for smallholders, and found that 41% of rice farmers were struggling to repay their debts.

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“These fertilizer and seed packages are intertwined with special interests,” Fisher said. It also highlighted the differences between Asia in the 1970s and the current situation in Africa. The first is cheap and available family labor in Asia compared to the exodus from the countryside in Sierra Leone.

Kabaka, a former employee of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural division, acknowledged concerns but was convinced his plan had the missing ingredient to unleash growth: critical infrastructure to help farmers process and sell rice, and incentivize them to grow more.

“If we don’t build the road, they (farmers) will live on subsistence forever,” he said.

Different way

Others believe Sierra Leone should spend its funding on measures that empower smallholder farms rather than large corporations.

Joseph Randall, director of environmental NGO Green Scenery in Sierra Leone, said the government should support sustainable practices such as compost rather than relying on imported chemical fertilizers, usually from Europe or North America, which contribute significantly to global warming.

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Randall opposes the distribution of modern seeds, even though they are more productive. Hybrid rice varieties cannot be saved and replanted every year, because they are bred by agricultural companies and have patents.

Meanwhile, in Manya village, thunder echoes in the chief’s rice fields. He pointed out that there is a swamp that can be cultivated within the goal of self-sufficiency.

He added: “The will is there, and the capabilities are there.” But he knows that feeding a nation requires more than means.

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