At the Africa Food Systems Forum (September 2025), Liberia stepped from policy into projection, unveiling a US$900 million Legacy Investment Program that, if fully realised, could reshape both the country’s rural economy and the wider West African food landscape. The announcement, delivered by Agriculture Minister Dr. J. Alexander Nuetah, was made against the Forum’s packed agenda and the gathering’s declared aim of turning national food-system priorities into “investment-ready” projects; the summit itself drew thousands of delegates from more than a hundred countries, marking the launch as both a national programme and a public invitation to investors, researchers and development partners to help co-design implementation at scale.
At its core the Legacy Investment Program is unapologetically practical: it identifies five priority commodities; rice, maize, coffee, cassava and oil palm, and pairs ambitious land and production targets with downstream ambitions for agro-processing, export revitalization and job creation. The plan sets out, among other targets, 50,000 hectares of rice to move Liberia toward self-sufficiency, 20,000 hectares of maize for both people and feed, 15,000 hectares of coffee to resurrect export earnings, 20,000 hectares of cassava to underpin food security and processing, and 18,000 hectares of oil palm to reduce edible-oil imports and raise foreign exchange receipts. The ministry frames these allocations as part of a wider productivity push built on improved seeds, mechanization, storage and market links, and as a strategic lever in Liberia’s aspiration to reach lower-middle-income status by 2030.
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The timing and the setting matter. The Africa Food Systems Forum is organized around an “investment facilitation” model that deliberately connects national plans to financiers, technical partners and private buyers; conveners emphasize the Forum’s role as a marketplace for structuring “bankable, impactful” projects, and the idea of a “legacy programme” is meant to surface national priorities that are immediately investible. That institutional architecture is what gives Liberia’s announcement traction beyond ceremony, it is a bid to move a policy wish-list into pipeline projects with measurable outcomes.
To understand what Liberia is attempting, it helps to see the gap the programme aims to close. Agriculture remains a cornerstone of Liberia’s economy and rural livelihoods, but the sector’s productivity and market integration lag behind the region’s needs. Rice, a cultural and caloric staple, has historically been a focus of national food-security debate; improving domestic rice yields is widely recognized as one of the fastest routes to reduce import bills and household hunger. International assessments and World Bank analyses have repeatedly argued that raising rice productivity, strengthening seed systems, and reducing post-harvest losses are bedrock interventions for poverty reduction and resilience in Liberia. Against that backdrop, the Legacy Program’s rice and cassava targets are tactical: they combine food security with opportunities for agro-processing and local value capture.
Liberia’s agricultural profile bears the legacies of conflict, market dislocation and long-term underinvestment. Coffee production, once a more sizeable export for Liberia in past decades, fell sharply through war and subsequent decades of low support; reviving that value chain will require attention to variety choice, quality control and the long timelines coffee rehabilitation entails. Cassava, already central to household diets, has latent potential for industrial uses; maize plays a dual role in food and feed; and oil palm, while attractive for edible-oil substitution, is the single crop that carries the largest environmental and reputational risks if expanded without strict safeguards.
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Those environmental risks are stark when viewed through Liberia’s landscape. Forests cover the majority of the country’s land area, making Liberia one of the most forest-rich nations in Africa. That endowment is both an asset and a constraint: it stores carbon, supports biodiversity and underpins customary livelihoods, but it also raises the stakes whenever land is reallocated for commercial agriculture. Liberia has taken legal strides, notably the 2018 Land Rights Act and subsequent policy efforts to clarify customary rights, but implementing inclusive land governance at the pace of commercial interest remains a central governance challenge. Any widescale expansion of plantation crops must therefore be reconciled with community tenure, forest protection and the government’s own commitments under climate and environmental accords.
The oil-palm component of Liberia’s plan is illustrative of the tightrope between opportunity and risk. Globally, palm oil is profitable and in high demand, yet it is also one of the commodity sectors most associated with tropical deforestation, forced land transfers and social conflict. Recent academic and investigative work has documented the complexities of “zero deforestation” commitments in forest-rich contexts like Liberia, and commercial expansion without effective safeguards can easily conflict with evolving market rules, not least new regulatory measures abroad that restrict agricultural imports linked to deforestation. For Liberia, the challenge is to unlock the macroeconomic benefits of edible-oil production while embedding binding environmental, labour and community safeguards at the project level. Without that, export pathways, especially to wary markets, could narrow, and local ecologies could pay a heavy price.
Climate change complicates every element of the plan. Liberia’s National Adaptation Plan and other climate assessments identify agriculture as a priority sector for adaptation due to changing rainfall patterns, flooding and the growing incidence of pests and diseases. The government and its partners will need to ensure that stimulus money prioritizes climate-smart agriculture: resilient seed varieties, improved water management, agroforestry and nature-based solutions that increase carbon sequestration while preserving productivity. Early signals matter: investment in irrigation, research (including varietal work supported by international crop-research partners), and extension services will determine whether the programme is judged a durable resilience-building exercise or a short-term productivity push that worsens vulnerability.
The financing architecture is both ambition and bottleneck. Minister Nuetah presented the Legacy Program as a partnership-ready package that has already drawn interest from development partners, including AGRA, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and bilateral delegations from Germany and Ireland. Those expressions of interest are important, since Liberia will need a mix of concessional finance, blended instruments, technical assistance, and private capital to translate hectares on paper into seeded fields, functioning mills and market linkages. Established funds and platforms, from GAFSP and MDB programmes to catalytic private funds, can provide parts of the capital stack, but success will hinge on credible safeguards, transparent procurement, and predictable policy settings that lower risk for commercial partners while protecting public goods.
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The AFS Forum’s 2025 theme, highlighting youth as central to collaboration and innovation, is a reminder that job creation, affordable finance for young farmers and agritech adoption will be decisive for public buy-in. Women, who make up a large share of the agricultural labour force in Liberia, must be front and centre of extension services, land-rights protections and access to credit. Strengthening farmer cooperatives, embedding gender-sensitive programming and investing in rural processing nodes that create non-seasonal employment will determine whether the Legacy Program translates into broad-based prosperity rather than concentrated extraction.
Implementation risks are as political as they are technical. Land disputes, weak enforcement capacity, corruption risks in large procurement, and insufficient community consultation would erode both social license and international support. Civil-society groups have long urged that community land rights be respected and that palm-oil projects, in particular, avoid the mistakes of the past by including benefit-sharing agreements, independent grievance mechanisms and third-party monitoring. Liberia’s legal reforms provide a framework, but bridging the gap between law and practice will require resourcing of local institutions, transparent mapping of proposed investments and clear, enforceable environmental and social covenants in every contract.
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Measurable progress on domestic rice production and a demonstrable reduction in import bills would be an early, politically visible win. Parallel gains would include increased yields per hectare across priority crops, measurable reductions in post-harvest losses through better storage and logistics, growth in local agro-processing, expanded formal employment in rural areas, and no net increase in deforestation attributable to the program.
Robust monitoring would openly report on land allocations, community consultations, GHG impacts and gender-disaggregated employment, and independent auditors would publish compliance scores against an agreed sustainability framework tied to disbursement triggers. Linking payments and financing tranches to these measurable indicators would help align incentives across state, private and donor actors. The Forum’s investment architecture and platforms for deal-making are designed to support precisely this kind of results-based structuring.
Liberia’s Legacy Investment Program is both an opportunity and a test case. On paper it is the kind of large, targeted commitment that Africa’s food systems need: clear priorities, a pathway toward scaling, and a public push to mobilize partners. In practice, the difference between a headline and a historic shift will be made by the program’s implementation design, whether it uses blended finance to reduce upfront risks for smallholders, whether it couples expansion with land-rights clarification and forest protection, whether climate resilience is baked into seed and infrastructure choices, and whether youth and women gain predictable, durable access to markets and credit. The Forum has provided an accelerating platform; now the hard work is to ensure that investment follows transparency, communities keep rights, and landscapes keep their trees.
