Cultivating Food Security

Food insecurity is one of the greatest humanitarian challenges of our time. A majority of the world’s population does not have access to adequate nutrition. Our current food cultivation and distribution paradigms, while global in reach, continue to fail in providing people in every part of the world with the sustenance needed to survive.

Sierra Leone, in particular, is still struggling with the legacy of a decade long civil war – one that decimated a historically fertile and productive food system. Sierra Leone was once considered the ‘bread basket’ of West Africa but now farmers across the country struggle to grow enough for their own consumption. There can be no challenge greater than the call to innovate in how we grow and distribute food, to make sure that adequate nutrition is offered at fair market prices for all and that local food systems are sustainable and permanent.

Sierra Leone is heavily dependent on imported rice to meet its food demand and this dependency is the greatest source of food insecurity in the region. Imported rice is more expensive then locally grown rice, less nutritious and is highly vulnerable to price fluctuations. The only solution is well known: local cultivation, local processing and local sales. This is both who we are and why we exist.

We support small farmers by providing them with all of the inputs required to increase production (see our Farmer Support Program for more), we then buy raw rice paddy from them and process it in our state-of-the-art mill. Once this rice is milled, we brand it and sell it to local retailers and wholesalers who then go on to sell this finished rice to the market. We are providing all of the missing links in the country’s food system – needed to eliminate food insecurity in the country and we won’t stop until our model has been deployed across West Africa.