Cabinet Reviews Performance of Agriculture Sector, Community Engagement Forum

The Liberian Cabinet has carefully reviewed the performance of its Agriculture and Agro-processing Task Force, with emphasis on highlighting the most critical challenges occasioning agricultural concessions and tree crop sectors.

The executive exercise was with the view of deriving solutions and the community engagement forum implementation agenda and mandated further review and inputs from cabinet to take corrective actions. According to the Executive Mansion release, the agriculture and agro-processing sectors underscored the potential for creating new jobs and improved livelihoods through agriculture value chain and manufacturing with emphasis on oil palm, cocoa, fisheries, aquaculture and rice production amid challenges faced in the iron and rubber sectors.

The Cabinet received updates on the status of the Out-grower Program for Community Oil Palm and advanced steps for the Government of Liberia to continue the Out-grower program in a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable way. Progress has been recorded on the out-grower model development amid multi-stakeholder alignment, according to the release.
The Cabinet was also briefed on benefits to be accrued from the Out-grower Scheme that would lead to empowering rural communities with land and high value crop ownership and skills, bring additional and near term revenues to government and will send strong signal to national and international community on forest conservation and economic empowerment. The Cabinet also reviewed a proposal for its aggressive community engagement forum aimed at using various channels of public engagements to communicate progress made, obtaining challenges and realistic targets set for implementation.

The the release indicated that the overall objective of the community engagement forum is to bring members of the Cabinet face-to-face with various social institutions and ordinary Liberians to engage openly and dialogue on where we were and where we are to date. Members of Cabinet were subsequently briefed on the arrival in country of the contractors that will demobilize the existing Defense Ministry structure that will pave the way for the construction of the Ministry Ministerial Complex in Congo Town outside Monrovia.

The Cabinet has mandated detailed consultations and increased contributions to ensure an all-encompassing participation in the community engagement forum process.