The Federal Government  has commenced plans to facilitate the purchase and installation of 18 large scale high quality cassava flour plants that would mill 1.3 million metric tonnes of high quality cassava flour per year.

The plants which would be run by the private sector, would be fully operational within 18 months, all across the cassava growing areas of the country, just as the nation’s cassava flour policy was directed at replacing some of the wheat flour in bread with a view to saving over  N250 Billion annually “in wheat imports”.

Disclosing this Thursday while speaking at the end of a 3-day 39th Regular Meeting of the National Council on Agriculture and Rural Development held in Enugu , the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development,  Dr Akinwumi Adesina, explained that this alone would make Nigeria the largest producer of cassava flour in the world. ”While skeptics at home wonder, other countries are noticing and applauding Nigeria. Already few African countries have indicated they would import high quality cassava flour from Nigeria as they too wish to follow Nigeria’s example in substituting cassava flour for wheat”.

Continuing, the minister further said: “The tide is turning. Africans are waking up and turning what used to be a poor man’s crop into a commercial crop for the breakfast table and Nigeria is leading the way. Our time for freedom has come.  Our president has set a clear direction: We must eat what we produce, and produce what we eat. Mr. President eats cassava bread. Our cassava flour policy is directed at replacing some of the wheat flour bread to save over 250 Billion naira annually in wheat imports”.

He maintained that “Our research institutions, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Federal Institute for Industrial Research have produced cassava bread. In the past, cassava farmers got excited and grew cassava but the flour mills did not buy the flour from the cassava processors and caused the collapse of some 135 small and medium scale processors” he stated.

According to him, the largest bakeries in Nigeria have all signed on to commercialise the cassava bread”, adding that the United Trading Company {UTC} had launched its cassava bread on a commercial scale.

The minister also disclosed that Nigeria’s Cocoa Transformational action plan was already making waves across Africa, adding that the release of the Eight Cocoa Hybrids in Nigeria “now puts us in a position to reach the One Million MT export volume within ten years”.

On efforts to make Nigeria self sufficient in rice production, Adesina  regretted that Nigeria spends over 350 Billion Naira per year or one billion every day to import rice, disclosing that “our rice transformation plan action plan has a target to make Nigeria self sufficient in rice production by 2015”.

His words: “We are working to ensure that Nigeria has 100 industrial scale rice mills with capacity in place to mill 2.1million MT of high quality rice that can compete with imported rice. They will be in operation within 18months, run by the private sector”.

Also speaking at the ceremony, the Deputy Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), in charge of Financial System Stability, Dr. Kingsley Moghalu, revealed that the apex bank had initiated a policy through which a concrete plan had been designed to facilitate lending to farmers.

The policy, Nigeria Incentive Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending, (NIRSAL), he said would gulp N 75 billion  to ensure its step-by-step based implementation.

Explaining the rationale behind the CBN’s NIRSAL policy, he said it was worrisome that despite the fact that agriculture contributed about 40 percent to the country’s GDP, it received less than 2 percent of bank’s lending.

He said the reason for the development was not un-connected to the much attachment to oil sector, stressing that “we are ready to change all that. Banks will now have overwhelming desire to lend to the people for agricultural purposes. Agriculture is a miracle about to happen”.

According to him, banks would be rated by the apex bank on how they lend to agriculture, adding “implementation of NIRSAL based lending is targeted to commence this March, 2012”.