Worried by the high
cost of rice in the country, the House of Representatives has wadded in, and urged the Federal Government to fully implement the National Policy on Rice so as to bring down the price of the essential commodity.
The House of Representatives is optimistic that the government will rise to the task of fully implementing the rice policy, with its attendant benefits, including bringing down the skyrocket price and make the commodity affordable to the masses, some of whom are paying through their nose for little quantity of rice.
The House said this much at a public hearing on the new rice tariff regime organised over the weekend by its committee on Customs and Excise, chaired by its chairman, Hon. Sabo Nakudu and featured stakeholders, including officers of the Nigerian Customs and Excise and members of the public.
Throwing more light on the committee’s position after the public hearing, Vice Chairman of the committee, Hon. Kingsley Chinda said, “Truly, you don’t need a legislation because of price or the price of rice in the market, with the current policy of the federal government if it’s implemented fully, I believe that the price of rice will crash. Today we have local rice that is grown here and processed here and bagged in this country; quality of our rice is even better than what we import. Some of the rice that are brought in to this country from India and other countries, you find out that these are food stuffs that have lasted for up to two, three, four, five years and they offload them to Nigeria but what we have from our local farmers are still fresh and very good, nutritious – better than what we import.
“So, I think that if we encourage the local farmers, they have the capacity to continue to do it and as they do that, price will definitely drop, we can surpass the over required quantity of about 6,000 tonnes and even export rice if we implement the rice policy effectively. Today rice farmers farm all season in Nigeria. They confessed they didn’t believe they could farm rice all season. So I think it’s a welcome development…
Chinda, a former commissioner for environment in Rivers State who was answering questions from The Tide continued:”. The public hearing met the objectives of the committee because we set out to look at the rice policy of the country and how well it has impacted on rice millers and growers and then the issue of food sufficiency, particularly in the rice sector, x-ray the problems and come up with solution to the problems, we realise that sometime  – 2011/2012 – the government came up with a rice policy, and part of that rice policy regime included the increase by 100% on the tariff on the importation of rice and last  year, with that 100% increase on the importation of rice, the cost of importation of rice into the country was so high as to discourage importers from bringing in rice from overseas and encourage our local farmers to have the enabling market to offload whatever products they have.

Justus Unye-Awaji, Abuja