By Amin Kef Sesay
Sierra Leone in the 1960s was a net exporter of rice produced largely from the bolilands in Kambia district in the North and Torma Bum in Bonthe district in the South.
Belatedly, since that time and having spent billions of dollars in the last five decades importing foods that can be produced here, President Bio’s New Direction Government has seen the crying need for food import substitution with launching of two massive rice value chain projects in Kambia and Bonthe districts. These two projects and others in the pipeline oriented toward import substitution and related modernization are expected to turn around the country’s economic reliance by 2025.
No doubt, unrestrained increases in food imports have had negative consequences for both the country’s agrarian sector and its economy as a whole. The key perils of satiating the market in an uncontrolled manner with imported food include declines in the profitability of domestic agricultural production, drops in economic activity, upticks in unemployment and, as a consequence, slowdown in economic growth.
Increases in imports and unresolved issues in the agrarian sector have for long caused a chain reaction of problems in other sectors of the national economy. At the national level, this has had negative repercussions in the form of slower economic growth, shrinking GDP and jeopardized food security.
Given the changes in the global food market, it is commendable that the country’s priority for agricultural development has shifted to ensuring food security while actively pursuing import substitution. However, going by the experience of J.S Momoh’s Green Revolution of the 1980s and the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on agriculture since the war ended in 2002 by different regimes without anything to show for it, we should watch this latest experiment cautiously for its sustainability and profitability.
Import substitution is a special type of economic strategy and industrial policy undertaken by the Government to protect the domestic manufacturer and provide the nation’s population with all necessary fast-moving consumer goods, food products and agricultural resources through substituting imported goods with domestically produced ones.
As highlighted above, the quest for food import substitution is not new. Import substitution was viewed by the first post-colonial Governments as a sure economic way of breaking free from colonial dependence or overcoming catch-up development in a climate of foreign nations wielding supremacy in the global market.
Globally, across the developing world, during the 20th century, a policy of import substitution was pursued by the nations of Latin America, Asia and Africa. The greatest success was recorded in Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, China, and Thailand.
Implementing a policy of import substitution has helped these nations achieve significant economic growth and draw level on many indicators with industrially developed nations.
An aggressive policy of pursuit of agri-food import substitution can facilitate growth and development across the agricultural sector, boost the nation’s food security as a result of decreased dependence on imports and the diversification of external economic relations.
Among the more significant outcomes is a considerable decline in the share of imports in the total pool of the nation’s commodity resources, accompanied by an increase in exports.
To be successfully implemented, import substitution requires both a short-term economic strategy and a long-term one. A short-term strategy requires diversifying the nation’s system of external economic relations as fast as possible through optimizing imports and exports of domestic goods, enhancing the geographic and goods structure of its foreign economic activity, and seeking out new ways to obtain imported goods from overseas.
A long-term economic strategy of import substitution implies replacing, based on technological modernization, imports with domestic goods produced by domestic manufacturers inside the country.
Secondly, implementing a policy of import substitution should enable the pursuit of the robust export policy, both at the national and local levels, backed by support from economic diplomacy, internal institutional measures, and an integrated tariff, tax, and foreign exchange mechanism.
The primary objective for food import substitution is to ensure the nation’s food security, i.e. produce as much high-quality food as will be enough to meet the population’s need for food, while meeting the need of national industry in raw materials. This especially holds for sectors within the agro-industrial complex, which possesses considerable industrial potential, including in the way of production of grain, vegetable oil, vegetables, meat, and potatoes, etc.
