Nigeria Set For Rice Availability

The president of Olam International, a global agricultural company, Rajeev Raina says that local rice production in Nigeria was set to grow substantially this year as his company has resolved to commence large-scale cultivation and processing of rice by the last quarter of the year.

The Singaporean firm announced recently that it would invest N7.675 billion in rice farming and milling facility in Nasarawa State with 60,000 hectares of irrigated paddy farming and rice milling.

The project which is expected to provide 60,000 tonnes of paddy annually to the processing facility would then be converted into 36,000 tonnes of milled rice.

The investment would also add quantum value to local rice production which will also reduce the nation’s reliance on importation of the staple food to feed her rising population.

With Nigeria consuming 5.5 million tonnes of rice annually, of which 3.6 million tonnes are produced locally by subsistence farmers, the balance of 1.9 million tonnes is being imported from Thailand, Vietnam, China and India.

According to the Minister of Agriculture Dr. Akinwunmi Adeisna that government currently spends N1 billion a day to import rice making the nation one of the largest importer of rice in the world was not healthy for the economy of the country.

“By the time you go to sleep tonight, we would have spent one billion naira buying rice, importing rice, don’t we have rice on this land,” he queried.

This kind of expenditure according to the minister cannot be sustained by the taxpayers.

He said the citizens were consuming beyond their means and that the trend was not development driven.

“This expenditure pattern cannot be sustained by Nigerians.

“We are eating beyond our means and continuing in that manner will not empower job creation in the country,” the minister opined.

With the growth in population not being accompanied by increase in area cultivation, we have seen a lot of pressure in respect of global rice supplies.