(UN Drive, Monrovia, November 2, 2020) The Government of Liberia (GOL) through the Ministry of Agriculture deposited a consignment of cassava product – Gari as it is locally referred to – with the General Services Agency (GSA), GOL’s arm for asset management, for Liberia’s first emergency food stock.
The prepositioning of food stocks to be distributed to vulnerable segments of the Liberian society is the part of the MOA’s created, financed by donors, to support the country’s COVID-19 Food Security, Livelihood and Nutrition Plan which the MOA developed in April this year.
A total of 20, 000 metric tons of various cassava products including “Fufu and deepah” flour were purchased from six Liberian businesses who have been in various types of cassava processing spanning more than a decade.

Falama, Bravo Sister, Destiny Women, Liberia Business Incubators, Logan and Logan, and Global Agro are the ones providing the products. 
The purchase was funded through the Contingency Emergency Response Component (CERC), a fund under the MOA’s supervised duo donor-funded Smallholder Agriculture Transformation and Agribusiness Revitalization Project (STAR-P) within the Program Management Unit.
The World Bank funds the STAR-P’s CERC.

Minister Cooper, accompanied by the newly appointed MOA's CERC's head, Assistant Minister for Administration, Ernest Jenkins Clarke and other senior staff, was excited.

“We are pleased to present this first consignment of cassava products purchased from Liberian processors to mitigate food insufficiency among the vulnerable population which has always been one of the targets of His Excellency, President George Manneh Weah, Sr. during this COVID-19 pandemic”, Agriculture Minister Jeanine Milly Cooper said as she presented 1, 600 bags of 25-kg  each of “Gari” to GSA’s Director General Mary Broh.
Director General Broh parallelly serves as the National Response Coordinator since April for the Presidentially constituted the Executive Committee on Coronavirus (ECOC) in Liberia.

Happily Broh said, “This is what we want to see” adding, “we must get use to our own local food, buy from them and I promise, Madam Minister [in reference to the Minister of Agriculture], the food will be properly accounted with high degree of transparency and it will reach the target vulnerable population as COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet”

Edible cassava, of all varieties, is Liberia’s second staple food after rice. It is produced by over 60 percent of farming households and a main provider of calories in the diet of Liberians, says a verified multi-donor and GOL’s National Cassava Strategy developed few years ago.