# **VI. Summary, Conclusion and Policy Implications**

Rice is a staple in Sierra Leone with an annual per capita consumption of 104kg—among the highest in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. Sierra Leone has ideal agroclimatic conditions for growing rice, including abundant rainfall, naturally fertile soils, sunlight and river basins; and nearly three-quarters of the country’s 5.4 million hectares is suitable for rice production. Sierra Leone has a natural comparative advantage in the production of rice and up until the mid-1950s it had been a net exporter of rice. However, except for a few instances in the immediate post-independence period, the country has not been able to achieve sustained self-sufficiency in rice production and consequently has spent an average of US$108.6 million on rice importation over the past 10 years.

The past efforts to reestablish sustained self-sufficiency in the rice sector have been mostly disappointing. Sierra Leone’s agricultural development policy has, since independence, focused on the achievement of self-sufficiency in rice, among other objectives, with most of the government support targeting smallholders but with minimal results. Questions have been raised about the impact of the waiver of the ECOWAS tariff on imported rice. These are key questions that have partly motivated this paper. The challenge is regarding what balance should be struck between the positive effects on consumer welfare of the lower price consequent on the waiver versus the adverse effects on producer welfare of the lower price, which mutes the supply response. The policy issue is complicated by the fact that some producers are also consumers when own-production falls short of household demand particularly during the “hunger season.”<sup>16</sup> The analysis in this study makes use of a programming model designed to produce a consistent quantitative framework for the Sierra Leone rice sector in order to simulate the effects of policy interventions as well as the potential impact of technical progress in the sector. The model is largely based on survey information collected in 2016. Importantly, the model is disaggregated across the five rice ecologies, thereby providing a richer set of simulation results. Furthermore, since the model includes both household as well as hired-in or temporary labor, some sense of the distributional impact of different trade or labor policy can be gleaned from the simulations.

Simulation of the base year as a basic validation test showed that the sector model performed well with only minor deviations between the survey data and the simulated results, with the exception of employment, where the simulated level of employment was lower than for the survey. This finding suggests that the sector is not optimal in the use of labor and is entirely consistent with the narrative of high levels of unemployment and underemployment in Sierra Leone. Over the 10-year period between 2009 and 2018 the unemployment rate in Sierra Leone has averaged 8.25 percent per year.<sup>17</sup> The simulation of the base year also suggests that Sierra Leone’s rice sector is operating at a sub-optimal level in the use of one critical resource—land. The use of two of the most productive ecologies—Mangrove Swamp and Riverain are well below their availabilities. The sub-optimal use of these two ecologies is reflected in the shadow prices. The shadow prices for a hectare of Mangrove Swamp and Riverain are $615.76 and $107.89, respectively. This means that bringing an additional hectare of the former ecology into production would increase producer/consumer surplus by $615.76 and an additional hectare of

> 16 The ‘hunger season’ runs usually from May to December, when local production is unable to meet domestic demand and import of rice is needed to fill the gap.

> 17 World Bank, World Development Indicators.

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