By Olando Testimony Zeongar
MONROVIA – Africa’s and Liberia’s first Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Florence Alletta Chenoweth, has died at age 78, Smart News Liberia has reliably learnt.
Dr. Chenoweth died in Monrovia on Monday, 26 June 2023, following a protracted period of illness, according to family sources.
Born in Robertsport, Grand Cape Mount County on April 2, 1945, Dr. Chenoweth, an agriculture and food security specialist, was appointed in 1977 by then President William R. Tolbert, as Liberia’s first female minister of agriculture, also making her the first woman in Africa to serve as minister of agriculture.
During the reign of Africa’s and Liberia’s first female President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Dr. Chenoweth also served as Minister of Agriculture, one of the longest serving cabinet ministers during the Sirleaf regime, until she resigned her post in the latter part of 2015.
Dr. Chenoweth, who worked for the World Bank as a technical adviser in Lusaka, Zambia and later as consultant in Washington, D.C., also served the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in several senior level positions – at some point, serving as the main link between the FAO, the United Nation’s General Assembly and the world.
She was a 1967 graduate of the state-run University of Liberia, with a BSc., and a Master’s degree in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970, and in 1986, earned her doctorate degree in land resources, when she enrolled in University of Wisconsin-Madison’s PhD program.
