The Federal Government is upbeat about halving the amount spent on imported rice in two years, but stakeholders in the local rice value chain want some problems addressed first, MAUREEN AZUH writes
DESPITE the plan by the Federal Government to reduce the importation of rice by 50 per cent in 2015, stakeholders have said more still needs to be done to encourage the production of the staple food locally.
In a bid to encourage the production of rice in the country, the government had said the importation of the commodity was expected to drop by 50 per cent in 2015.
The government insisted that the nation had the capacity to produce the staple food in abundance.
The ban on foreign rice is expected to boost local production to meet domestic consumption as well as export demands as the importation is said to cost the country about $1bn annually.
The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, said the ban would be enforced because Nigerian farmers would be producing more than enough rice to effectively cater for the needs of the citizens.
Reacting to the development, the President, Rice Millers, Importers and Distributors Association of Nigeria, Mr. Tunji Owoeye, said the various moves by the government to improve local rice cultivation had not been reflected in all the production stages.
“Yes, there has been a marginal increase in paddy production but not in processing. There are three stages: planting, which is also the production; the harvested one is paddy, which is later processed into finished rice. There has been an improvement due to government’s incentives, but it has not translated into increased processing,” he said.
According to Owoeye, the Federal Government has failed to engage stakeholders in the industry in the process and this has created a lot of setbacks.
He said, “The major rice stakeholders are not carried along in this value chain; the government is doing this and working independent of the value chain drivers.
“So, the move and the intervention funds have only increased the awareness of rice farmers in going into cultivation but there is still no optical for the paddy rice today; so, the chain is being broken.”
He said another major setback to the realisation of the 2015 target was smuggling, adding that the cost of smuggled rice to Nigeria was cheaper than the locally-produced paddy.
He said, “A bag of rice that has just been harvested before processing costs N6,500, while a bag of smuggled rice still costs N6,500. Now, don’t forget that after buying the paddy, you are going to spend money in processing it into finished rice, you still have to spend up to N5,000; so, the cost has made almost all the processing companies to close shop.
“There is no commercial processing company that is producing because they are not competing well; the cost of finished smuggled rice from Benin Republic is far cheaper than the cost of rice in the farm before it goes into processing.”
The Director of Press, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr. Greyne Anosike, said though the ministry was not responsible for the activities at the borders and so could not be held accountable; it was worried about the development.
“If we stop smuggling imported rice, Nigerians will be forced to face the locally-produced rice; so, that is one of the worries of the ministry for now,” he said.
Anosike said massive tax had already been placed on the importation of the commodity to enable Nigerians to look inward to locally-produced rice.
He said, “It is not just about the money invested, which I cannot put a figure to now; the essence of the whole programme is to make Nigerian farmers as rich as their British or American counterparts.
“We spend up to $1bn every year to import rice, the government targets cutting it by half in 2015 so that the money will go to our farmers here in Nigeria. Hopefully, importation, if not totally eradicated, will be cut by 50 per cent in 2015.”
According to Anosike, the move was necessitated by a directive from President Goodluck Jonathan to the Minister of Agriculture to ensure that the country meets the demand for rice locally by 2015.
Anosike said one of the steps the ministry had taken to meet the target was the introduction of dry season rice farming, which was to encourage farmers to plant rice in the dry season.
He said the new method was already yielding results with some northern states expected to produce about one third of the total national demand in the shortest possible time.
He said, “So, we now avail ourselves of irrigation facilities in most states of the North to engage in dry season rice farming. The outcome of our trips to Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara states showed that these three states alone could possibly have produced one third of our national requirement.
“What we are saying is that if in one dry season farming, they have been able to produce one third of the national demand, then what happens in the main season for rice farming, which we are currently in, is there will be mass production.
“The government now insists that even before 2015, we will meet our requirement in local rice production. There are 10 dry season rice farming states in the North, but we have listed only two: Kebbi and Zamfara, and what we saw was more than enough to meet one third of the national demand.
“We have not even gone to Jigawa, Kano, Kogi, Niger, Kebbi, Yobe states and others. By the time the 10 states produce the quantities we saw in Kogi, Kebbi and Zamfara, we would certainly have surplus rice.”
Although there have been different funding windows for the sector, investigations showed that many Nigerians still preferred imported rice to the detriment of local rice farmers.
Anosike said the Federal Government had agreed with some state governments to encourage local rice farmers by buying their surplus.
“There was surplus rice production in Kebbi State this year, but the state government has assured us that it will buy it off the farmers because if they are producing and nobody is patronising them, they will be discouraged, that is why we have also established 23 large rice silos all over the country. By 2015, we would have met more than what we require as a country,” he said.
The director said the Federal Government was also working on the issue of multiple taxation, which most of the local farmers had complained about, adding that the minster had promised them subsidy on transporting rice from one state to another.
Punch
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