Liberia Is Improving on Food Security — But Two Counties Are Being Left Behind

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has published its West Africa Food Security Assessment for the first quarter of 2026. For Liberia, the headline finding is an improvement: the share of the population classified as food insecure — defined as lacking adequate access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food — has declined from approximately 32% in 2023 to 27% in 2025, driven by improved agricultural output, falling food prices relative to their 2024 peak, and increased income from the mining and construction sectors in Nimba, Bong, and Montserrado counties.

The national improvement, however, masks a persistent and deepening geographic divide. In Lofa County, food insecurity has increased from 38% to 42% over the same period, driven by the collapse of cross-border trade routes with Guinea following border closures related to a localised health emergency in mid-2025. Lofa is Liberia's most agriculturally productive county for cocoa, coffee, and palm oil, but it is also among the most isolated from national markets, with road access severely limited during the rainy season. When cross-border trade — which supplements farm income for approximately 60% of Lofa households — is disrupted, food insecurity increases rapidly.

Grand Gedeh County presents a different challenge. With no major commercial agricultural operations and limited government service presence, the county has structural food insecurity driven by chronically low household incomes and poor transport connectivity to food markets. The FAO identifies Grand Gedeh, along with River Gee and Grand Kru counties in the southeast, as requiring emergency humanitarian intervention in the first half of 2026, with an estimated 45,000 people in the Phase 3 (Crisis) food security classification.

The policy response has been inadequate relative to the scale of the problem. The government's National Food and Nutrition Security Policy, adopted in 2023, contains appropriate frameworks but minimal budget allocation — the Ministry of Agriculture's recurrent budget for food security programmes is approximately $8 million annually, against an estimated need of $40–50 million to address the identified gaps. International donors, including the World Food Programme, USAID, and the European Union, fill part of the gap, but humanitarian aid is not a substitute for structural improvements in road access, market connectivity, and agricultural productivity investment in the counties that need them most.