Sierra Leone loves rice and wants to free itself from imports. But how to do it?

abcnews.go.com:

Rice borders on the sacred in Sierra Leone, which has one of the world's highest consumption rates

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Rice borders on the sacred in Sierra Leone. Unless a meal includes rice, people say, you haven’t eaten at all.

But as prices soar, consumers in the West African nation are giving up other food to buy it. That's a major reason why 83% of the population is food insecure, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program.

In the capital, Freetown, 28-year-old nail technician Anima Mangola dug into rice with stewed cassava leaves. “I’d eat rice five times a day if I had me the money," she said — even as its price has more than doubled this year.

Not everyone can keep up, and “people are suffering,” she said.

Experts blame soaring prices on a heavy reliance on imports, which supply 35% of Sierra Leone's rice and eat up $200 million annually in foreign currency.

Even though West Africa has a long tradition of growing rice and often excellent places to do it, experts said the import dependency is due to a lack of investment in agriculture, booming population growth and cheap rice imports from Asia.

Sierra Leone's agriculture minister, Henry Kpaka Musa, accused the International Monetary Fund of pressuring Sierra Leone in the 1980s to stop investing in agriculture and open its markets to imports as a condition for receiving loans.

“We used to export rice,” Kpaka said in an interview.

Now he and President Julius Bio plan to do it again. The government has raised over $620 million from global development banks this year to work towards food self-sufficiency, notably in rice, although Kpaka estimated the plan will cost $1.8 billion in all. Experts from the Ivory Coast-based research center Africa Rice have commended