By: Vickie Remoe
Three years into Feed Salone, Sierra Leone is growing more of its own rice, importing far fewer eggs and onions, and cutting the share of families going hungry. But big projects are running behind, and most of the money pledged has yet to reach the field. Those are the headlines from the Feed Salone Year Three Report, published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security under Minister Dr Henry Musa Kpaka. It covers October 2025 to September 2026, a year when the Middle East conflict pushed up the price of fuel and fertiliser. The rice import bill has fallen from about US$177 million to about US$154 million. Rice now covers 661,016 hectares, and average yields rose from 2.13 to 2.37 tonnes a hectare, the best gain in three years. Inland valley swamps are doing the heavy lifting.
They make up under half the rice area but grow 58% of the rice, at almost twice the yield of upland farms. Rehabilitated swamp land grew from 1,950 hectares in 2023 to 6,615 hectares in 2025. The biggest pieces are still to come. New mills at Tormabum and Gbondapi, each able to mill about 8 tonnes of rice an hour, are due in early 2027. The Year One report in 2024 said agriculture’s share of the budget had risen from 2% to 7%, with a target of 10%. Two years later, it stands at just over 8%. For investors, each of these gaps is an opening: input supply, processing, milling, drying and cold storage. These openings are the focus of “Transforming Agribusiness & Driving Food Security (Feed Salone in Action)”, a panel at the Sierra Leone Diaspora Investment Conference in Freetown. It explores commercial ways into the farm economy, from poultry production and rice value addition to cold-chain storage, and how to build businesses that replace costly imports.
