Endowed with vast arable land for crop and livestock production, Nigeria has always maximized its rice cultivation potential. Yet, one thing has always threatened the local production of the staple food crop on a commercial scale.
It is the smuggling of foreign rice cultivated in Thailand and China, among other world nations steeped in rice farming.
Agro-food associations such as RIPAN have remained dogged in advocating workable strategies to curb the increased smuggling of rice into the country. Severally, it has warned that the influx of foreign rice into the Nigerian market legally or illegally is not a good idea for the nation’s economic development.
The federal government, however, appears not to have summoned the desired political will to implement some portent recommendations that RIPAN, over the years, has always offered towards tackling the importation of rice into our dear country. For instance, at a press conference in April this year, RIPAN highlighted ways to make local rice gain comparative advantage over its foreign counterpart.
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Andy Ekwelem, Director General of the umbrella body of Nigerian rice processors, at the media conference, called on the government to launch a funding programme to enable rice processors and millers to engage in paddy production through large-scale farming, out-grower scheme and contract farming, among others.
The RIPAN boss advised the federal government to design and create an agricultural flagship platform that can lend to agriculture at a single interest rate as it is practiced globally. This could be achieved through the creation of a “grain risk fund” that can take care of the exigencies of the grain industry, Ekwelem said.
Amid the surge in rice importation, albeit illegally, into Nigeria at this moment, there is the need for the federal government to become proactive. It should heed the extant calls of RIPAN on how to boost the anti-rice smuggling war, which primarily entails devising effective strategies to tackle Nigerian economic saboteurs fuelling rice smuggling – once and for all. That is the surest way to salvage the dwindling fortunes of our local rice farmers and processors.
Mahmud is the deputy editor of PRNigeria, and wrote in via: [email protected]
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