Nigeria mills 5.7 million tones of rice annually….Kebbi, Kano on the lead – GEMS4

The efforts of the present administration to reduce the over $1 billion spent on rice importation has begun to yield the desired result following the increase in local rice production to about 5.7 tonnes annually, bringing the country close to rice sufficiency in the nearest future.

It was also discovered that the major challenge of rice farmers generally was funding, access to improved quality seadlings, irrigation for dry season farming, difficulties acquiring agro-inputs, fertiliser and accessing credit.

This was contained in a report titled ‘Mapping of rice production clusters in Nigeria,’ published by the Growth and Employment in States (GEMS4), a programme funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DfID), released in April 2017.

According to the report, the 18 states were selected based on their contributions to national production via the 2015 Agricultural Production Survey (APS) where studies were conducted among rice farmers spread across 165 clusters and 2,812 sub-clusters.

The report disclosed that the total paddy production in Nigeria in 2016 has been estimated at 17,487,562 metric tons, leaving a balance of about 11.4 million metric tons with 12.4 per cent of rice production wasted due to post-harvest losses. This left a total of 5.7 million metric tons of milled rice, bringing Nigeria’s rice production closer to the 7 million projected milled rice requirement for 2016.

“The 2016 total paddy production estimate is put at 17.5 million tons with a marketing surplus (after post-harvest losses and domestic use) of 11.4 million tons (equivalent to 5.7 million tons milled equivalent), just below the total national demand for rice which was projected to reach 7 million in 2016. This implies that the country is progressing towards its goal of rice self-sufficiency,” GEMS4 stated.

The report further revealed that Kebbi state leads the country in rice mill with 3.56 million metric tons for the wet and dry seasons production combined, followed by Kano with 2.82 million metric tons. Kebbi produced 2.05 million metric tons in the wet season and 1.51 million metric tons in the dry season while Kano produced 1.86 and 0.96 million metric tons during the wet and dry seasons respectively over the same period under review.

The report stated that only 10 of the 18 states were involved in the dry season production, contributing 26.57 per cent of the total production.

The report was compiled after GEMS4 embarked on the mapping of the 18 rice producing states of Bauchi, Benue, Ebonyi, Ekiti, FCT, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara, Nassarawa, Niger, Ogun, Sokoto, Taraba and Zamfara.

The findings by GEMS4 revealed the responses of states to the federal government’s policy goal of reducing import dependence, particularly of rice which drains about $1billion annually on importation. The report also stated that 10 per cent of total arable land in Nigeria is used for rice cultivation and although Nigeria is the largest producer of rice in West Africa, it is the second largest importer of rice globally”.

An analysis of the report revealed a dry season production of 4,646,296.64 metric tons or 26.57 per cent, cultivated on 3,037,324 hectares of farmlands and wet season production of 12,841,265.18 metric tons or 73.43 per cent, cultivated over 859,624 hectares. It also showed that 1.43 million rice farmers were involved in the wet season, representing 17.7 per cent of farming families in the wet season in Nigeria.

The report also pointed out that during the dry season, a total number of 410,210, farmers, representing only 5.1 per cent of the total farming families were involved in dry season rice farming.

GEMS4 also discovered that the average yields per hectare during the dry season was comparatively higher than in wet seasons for all states involved in both wet and dry season cultivation, which opens an area of great prospects for policy intervention in rice production in Nigeria. The average yield per hectare of rice during the wet season was found to be the highest in Ebonyi, at 5.63 metric tons but lowest in Kwara at 2.68. For the dry season, Niger recorded the highest average yield per hectare of 6.45 metric tons while Kaduna had the least average yield per hectare of 3.5 metric tons.

The report, however, listed the potential for increasing productivity, pointing out that 13 per cent of farmers reported were using high-yielding planting method (transplanting seedlings), while 32 per cent used irrigation and 56 per cent had access to one hectare of additional land. The report stated that the major challenge of farmers generally was funding, reporting that most farmers reported difficulties acquiring agro-inputs, particularly quality seed and fertiliser and accessing credit.

“Infrastructure such as irrigation facilities, feeder roads and storage facilities constituted an area of challenge with poor quality or a total lack of it. Others include flooding in wet season, poor access to information on modern methods of farming and post-harvest technologies, poor access to credit, and a loss of labour through migration of young people to cities, resulting in aging farming population. Considering the value of rice produced locally, farmers in the 18 states under consideration have generated an estimated N102.6 billion as additional contribution to Nigeria’s economy through rice production” the report stated.