New Brookfields Hotel, Freetown, Thursday 5 October 2023 – His Excellency President Dr Julius Maada Bio has engaged development partners and stakeholders in the agricultural sector, where he said with his government’s focus on human capital development to drive sustainable growth in the country, “we are prioritising investment in agriculture through the Feed Salone Programme.”
In his keynote address to the Feed Salone Roundtable Agenda event organised by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security that “the Feed Salone programme will receive up to 10 percent of our national budgetary allocation over the next five years. The programme will ignite agricultural productivity, safeguard food security and foster inclusive economic growth, laying the foundation for sustainable prosperity”.
President Bio told the stakeholders, drawn from civil society organisations, development partners, the private sector, and farmers, that there was no reason for Sierra Leone to be a net food importer, considering how richly blessed the country was with abundant land and water resources, ample sunshine and an accessible labour force.
“We enacted sound public policies to stimulate sound private sector investments. The government primarily focused on de-risking the investment space while supporting the enabling environment for private sector players to participate.
“To this end, my government created a $10 million United States facility to stimulate private sector participation in importing and distributing fertiliser, seed production, and other agrochemicals. We must now turn our rural areas from economic misery to economic prosperity zones. This requires a total transformation of the agriculture sector,” the President appealed.
He emphasised that, at the core of Feed Salone, rapid agricultural industrialisation must focus not only on primary production but also on developing agricultural value chains adding that the Feed Salone Programme encapsulated a government vision for sustainable agricultural transformation that would build on gains and scale-up interventions to foster food security and sovereignty in Sierra Leone.
“I will also establish a Presidential Council on Agriculture that I will chair. The Presidential Council will constitute Ministries, Departments, Agencies, MDAs, the private sector, farmers, academia, research institutions, and civil society to oversee the successful implementation of the Feed Salone Programme,” the President assured.
The Feed Salone initiative has five specific goals: reducing importation of key staple foods (rice, onions, and poultry production), boosting export earnings from the country’s cash crops, creating jobs, rejuvenating rural areas using agriculture as the driver of new growth, reducing hunger and malnutrition, and building resilience to economic shocks.
United Nations Resident Coordinator, Babatunde Ahonsi, while contributing to the theme “Partnership for the Delivery of the Feed Salone Agenda,” emphasised the relationship between food security and sustainable development, pointing out that progress toward food security would definitely deliver progress on all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs.
“On behalf of the international development partners and the United Nations Foundation, we are pleased to commend His Excellency President Julius Maada Bio and his government for facing agriculture and food security, climate change, and innovation as national priorities under the Feed Salone initiative as one of the five big game changers for accelerating economic growth and building resilience in the nation.”
“The Feed Salone Strategy is entirely an ambitious initiative, especially in the context of significant resource constraints and the generally unstable global environment. It will therefore need to galvanise as many partnerships as possible to ensure its effective implementation in the areas of optimisation of resources, delivery capacity, technical expertise within and beyond the country, networking, government, and society,” he urged.
Dr. Ahonsi also confirmed that “the United Nations system in Sierra Leone, in collaboration with other development partners, stands ready to support the fine-turning, finalisation, and better implementation of the Feed Salone programme with the requisite capacities, technical assistance, and resource partnerships”.
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