Rice importation dropped from 644, 131 to 20,000 tones in Sept – Audu Ogbeh

The ongoing efforts of the Federal Government to reduce importation of rice and encourage local production, with a view to saving critical foreign exchange, may have yielded positive results, as the Federal Government has disclosed that there has been a drastic drop in the importation of rice to the country.

According to the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, who stated this at the end of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) Meeting in Abuja, on Wednesday, the government was on the winning path to economic diversification as rice importation had dropped from 644, 131 to 20,000 tonnes in September. He also said that the war on smuggling must be intensified, as it was yielding results

Ogbe said the FEC also discussed the disturbing trend of smuggling, adding that it was impacting negatively on the economy. He said,“We have to deal with that because, while we are making a great deal of progress in our production of grains; the smugglers are trying to compromise the successes we have achieved. “I can give you some figures.

Between September 2015 and now, rice importation through the ports, had dropped from 644,131 tons to 20,000 tons in September this year, which means that by the end of this year to the early part of next year, we can literally say we are closed to total self-sufficiency in rice.
“On the other hand, in Republic of Benin, rice importation has increased to 1.33 million tons because, they don’t eat parboiled rice, they eat white rice.
So, every grain of rice landing there is heading for Nigeria through smuggling; and some of it also comes in through Niger Republic. These are issues to deal with because we want local rice production to meet our needs and we are creating jobs. “There are at least 12.2 million farmers in the country now and they are enjoying life the way they haven’t before. So these are the issues we raised today.”

The minister also said the government was going to intensify its onslaught on smugglers as the country was currently losing over $5billion to the nefarious activities. He noted that the delay in rice millers setting up mills has also contributed to the huge sum being lost to smuggling.
He explained, “The delays happen because many of the millers tell me that they can’t mill because of the activities of smugglers. They mill the rice. The smugglers dump them at N12, 500. And the smugglers can dump at N12, 500 because they are subsidised from Thailand.

They are determined to see that we don’t succeed. We can’t do that because we can’t subsidise to that level…” “We say if everything goes well without the smugglers, our people should be able to sell here at N13, 500 per bag. They agreed, but then the smugglers are coming and the millers are holding back. I alone can’t solve the problem. That was why the president had to say yesterday (during the 2018 budget presentation at the National Assembly) that we will come down hard on activities of smugglers, because they are doing us a lot of damage.

“In fact, the World Bank says that they are costing us $5billion worth of loss per annum. We keep fighting, little here, a little there. We’ll get there.” Also, at the meeting, the Federal Government has approved the sum of N5.567, 314,541.76bn for the third quarter soil erosion controlled accelerated intervention projects for six states in different geo-political zones in the country.

The approval was made on Wednesday, during the FEC meeting presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja. The Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr Femi Adesina disclosed this at the postFEC briefing in company with Audu Ogbeh and Minister of State Aviation, Hadi Sirika. The benefiting states, according to the government, are: Kano, Ondo, Osun, Enugu and Bayelsa; and Sokoto South Local Government, Ogbeh said that council approved the development for foundation seeds for maize to the Institute of Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria.

Mathew Dadiya