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Central Agricultural Research Institute CARI

Suakoko, Bong, Liberia • 40 Employees
Farming

The Central Agricultural Research Institute (CARI) located at Suakoko, some 180 km north‐west of Monrovia was created in 1980 from the Central Agricultural Experiment Station (CARES) to conduct both adaptive and applied research in agriculture. In the 1980‘s the Institute had seven commodity-based programmes (rice, cassava, cattle, swine, cocoa, coffee, and vegetables) and planning had been initiated for a cropping systems programme (Francis et al., 1995). However, CARI was devastated by the civil war both in human and physical terms. The physical infrastructure was severely damaged, the contents of buildings looted and professional and technical staff scattered both in‐country and abroad and in some instances killed.CARI restarted very limited operations in 2006, focusing on the provision of planting materials for rice (from WARDA), cassava, yams and a limited range of cultivars of maize, beans, and soybeans (from IITA) (Ministry of Agriculture, 2008) a focus which has continued with little change to date. On the other hand, various initiatives have been mooted since 2007 to re‐vitalize CARI but so far progress has been extremely limited. Ideally, CARI should be a semi-autonomous organ of the Ministry of Agriculture.The Current Vision, Mission and Management Structure of CARIAccording to documents sourced from CARI and USAID Liberia country office, the institute‘s Vision is:"Make agriculture business"Its mission is:"To undertake applied and adaptive research for enhanced productivity of food, feed, fiber, and other agricultural products in Liberia for the attainment of food security, poverty alleviation, income generation and job creation"The mission statement reasonably reflects the purpose for CARI‘s existence and defines the ultimate benefits to be realized by its services. However, it does not clearly stipulate how the institute‘s services will be rendered.