There is a substantial literature on the link between rice and other cereal prices and poverty. The key in this literature is to assess the double impact that a change in the price of rice can have through producers (who benefit from an increase in prices) and consumers (who loose out when the price increases). Early work was conducted by Deaton (1989) using data from Thailand (see also Singh et al., 1986). Similar methods have been used in sub-Saharan Africa among others by Barrett and Dorosh (1996) for Madagascar and Budd (1993) for Cote d’Ivoire. Most of these studies have found that food price increases tend to lead to an increase in poverty because the consumption effects dominate the production effects as many countries are net importers of food, at least in sub-Saharan Africa<sup>2</sup> .

In Liberia however, at least under the current conditions, the impact of a change in the price of rice is not ambiguous. This is because a large share of the rice that is consumed is imported, while the rice that is locally produced is used mostly for auto-consumption rather than for sale on the market. In such circumstances, an increase in the price of rice, whether imported or locally produced, will tend to result in higher poverty in the country as a whole (even if some local producers will gain from this increase), while a reduction in price will lead to a reduction in poverty. Furthermore, because rice represents such a large share of the food consumption of households, any change in the price of rice is likely to have a rather large effect on poverty measures.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents basic data on rice production and consumption in Liberia based on two main sources of information: the Comprehensive Assessment of the Agriculture Sector prepared by Liberia’s Ministry of Agriculture (2007), and the results from the Comprehensive Food Security and Nutrition Survey (CFSNS) completed from March to April 2006 with data for 5,409 households. Our own analysis of patterns of rice consumption and production using the 2007 CWIQ survey (which is based on a sample of 3,600 households) is provided in Section 3. In section 4, we assess the potential impact on poverty of changes in the price of rice. A brief conclusion follows.

> 2 Work has also been done on the issue of the impact of changes in food prices using CGE and other general equilibrium models, especially on Indonesia.  This is a country that used to import substantial amounts of rice, but where restrictions were progressively placed on imports in order to help local producers, with imports of rice actually banned after 2004.  Warr (2005) find that the ban on rice imports raised the price of domestically produced rice, and that this led to an increase in poverty by almost one percentage point (on the Indonesia story as well as for a more general discussion on the experience of governments in Asia to stabilize the price of rice, see Timmer and Dawe, 2007).  Another paper on Indonesia by (Sumarto et al., 2005) using panel data suggests that the practice of subsidizing rice as part of a social safety net led to a reduction in the risk for household to be poor.  Papers on Vietnam by Niimi et al. (2004) and Minot and Goletti (1998) suggest that the liberalization of rice exports probably led to a reduction in poverty despite an increase in the price of rice in the country, thanks essentially to increased rice production of rice.