From a Bloomberg report in BusinessDayLive.

Liberia has entered a recession and the government needs to curb spending as the world’s deadliest Ebola outbreak in West
Africa has hampered agriculture and business, Finance Minister Amara Konneh told reporters in the capital, Monrovia, Thursday.

“It means we have to tighten our belts by reducing expenditure to within our means,” Konneh said.

The International Monetary Fund cut its expansion forecast for Liberia’s economy to 2.5 percent this year from a previous
estimate of 5.9 percent, spokesman Ismaila Dieng said Thursday. The other West African nations at the center of the outbreak also had their outlooks reduced. Sierra Leone was cut to 8 percent from 11.3 percent and Guinea to 2.4 percent from 3.5 percent, Dieng said.

Those countries each needed as much as $130 million in fiscal and balance-of-payment support and the IMF was exploring ways it could help, IMF spokesman William Murray said. Liberia, whose economy was gutted during a 1989-2003 civil war, grew by 8.7 percent in 2013, Konneh said.

Liberia has been the worst hit by the Ebola outbreak, recording 1,224 of the 2,288 deaths since the first case in December,
the World Health Organisation said. Liberia’s ministry of health put the country’s death toll at 1,263. There have also been eight deaths in Nigeria, the WHO said.

The government will probably fail to meet revenue projections outlined in a draft budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year that is awaiting approval, Konneh said.

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf requested emergency spending power, with $20 million planned to contain the epidemic, he
said.

The virus spread the most in the farming county of Lofa, preventing farmers from tending their fields and curbing output
of food crops, coffee and cocoa, Konneh said.

“We are missing the entire farming season because of this Ebola crisis,” he said. The country’s ability to cope with the outbreak is “running thinner by every passing day.”

Sime Darby, the world’s largest palm oil producer, slowed
production, and ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel maker, has delayed expansion plans at an iron-ore mine there.

Read more at BusinessDayLive.