The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said it had trained rice millers from five states in the North-East on modern techniques of rice processing.
The director of agriculture in the ministry, Hajiya Karima Babangida, stated this in Gombe at the closing of a three-day capacity building and training for rice farmers and millers.
Represented by the state director of agriculture, Dr Musa Muhammad Inuwa said the participants were drawn from Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Taraba and Plateau states, under the auspices of the Association of Small and Medium Scale Modular Rice Millers of Nigeria (ASMORIN).
“One of the major challenges of our milled rice is poor quality, which is attributed to poor parboiling methods. This was responsible for the lack of market competitiveness of our milled rice and fuels smuggling of foreign rice into the country,” Karima said.
She said women parboilers played a vital role in the agricultural value chain, “where about 70 per cent of the rice consumed in the country is produced by small and medium scale processors who rely on them to parboil their rice.”
The director added that the training was part of federal government’s strategies to make Nigerian milled rice competitive through promotion of modern simple and efficient parboiling technology.
Speaking on behalf of female rice farmers, Dr Erisa Danladi appealed to the federal government for improved rice seedlings, fertiliser and other equipment for processing in order to produce qualitative rice.
She promised that they would put into practice what they learnt during the three-day training, adding that the beneficiaries would step down the training to other members of the association.
