Nigerians Shall Not Live On Rice Alone

SIR: President Muhammadu Buhari’s “rice revolution’’ is laudable. Before the ‘’crop rebellion’’, Nigeria spent about $1.65 billion annually importing rice from Thailand and India. But the country is not yet home and dry in food production.

In December 2018, Godwin Emefiele, governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said as of 2015, the country’s food import bill was $7.9 billion, but that the figure plummeted to $1.6 billion in 2018.

However, in September 2018, Audu Ogbeh, former minister of agriculture, put Nigeria’s annual food import bill at $22 billion. The fact is, Nigeria was spending its future away importing food.

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Do not get me wrong. The rice revolution is a good one. Nigeria’s dependence on foreign rice is whittling and our production capacity is burgeoning.

At the 25th edition of the Nigeria Media Merit Award (NMMA), President Buhari accentuated this feat.

He said: ‘’Rice importation from Thailand fell from 644,131 tons in September 2015 to 20,000 tons in September 2017, representing a 95 percent drop. Self-sufficiency in rice is so important because it is the most widely consumed staple in Nigeria, and also because Nigeria’s daily expenditure on rice for over three decades stood at $5 million a day!”

Also, figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) showed that rice production has increased from an average of 7.1 million tonnes between 2013 and 2017 to 8.9 million tonnes in 2018.

But rice is not Nigeria’s only biggest import.  Some of the country’s other huge food imports are sugar, wheat, and fish. Of the quoted annual import bill of $22 billion, these commodities bite off a chunk.

According to Adekunle Oresegun, director of the Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research Lagos, Nigeria spends about $1 billion annually on the importation of fish. This is about the same amount the country spent importing rice yearly.

Really, with the immense aquatic resources of the country, we have no business spending $1 billion importing fish annually.

Just as the government has scored a winning goal in boosting rice production, attention should be turned to other areas of agriculture where Nigeria has a comparative advantage – in the true sense of diversification.

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Nigeria spends $100 million importing sugar annually – the largest import bill for the product in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is despite the fact that the country can acquire the capacity to produce enough of the commodity to meet local demand. Currently, our sugar output only meets seven percent of the demand.

In addition, wheat production is a sphere the government needs to zero in on; though I am aware there is some effort in this area. Nigeria spends about $4.2 billion importing the commodity. At the moment, local production is still infinitesimal when weighed against demand. This accounts for the rising cost of bread.

In the true sense of diversifying the economy, the government needs to linchpin areas in agriculture where we have a comparative advantage to drastically reduce our food import bill.