The Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, has said that the proposed tariff regime on rice is needed to protect local investors in rice, including farmers and millers, as well as create jobs and wealth for Nigerians.
Dr. Adesina said the Federal Government’s policy on rice a core strategy under the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) has succeeded beyond all expectations.
Speaking at a public hearing on rice policy at the National Assembly recently, the Agriculture minister disclosed that Nigeria has the capacity to become not only self-sufficient, but a net exporter of rice, adding that the Federal Government and the stakeholders in the rice sector are determined to reduce the ridiculously high foreign exchange of over N365 billion being spent annually on rice import.
According to the Minister, it made no sense at all that Nigeria, with an arable land area of 84 million of arable land, is the second largest importer of rice in the world.
The country, he said, definitely can grow rice and end the decades of dependence on rice imports from India and Thailand, “as they don’t have anything that we do not have to produce rice.”
He said it is time we realized that the more Nigeria imported food items that can be grown locally, the less local production and the high level of unemployment and the worse the country’s insecurity.
The Minister explained that this is why the present administration is driving a major import substitution drive on rice and other commodities under the Agricultural Transformation Agenda.
Dr. Adesina said Nigerians needed to frown upon the heavy flow of import of low quality and sometimes very unsafe foods, including rice and fish, wondering why some citizens are vigorously campaigning and taking sides with importers, wondering why we must import what we can produce, a situation he called “prodigal economics”.
According to Adesina, international trade experts say the only option for Thailand and India to get rid of their excess rice stock pile of 18 and 14 million metric tones respectively is to dump it on foreign markets at a loss.
Thailand, he said, subsidized its farmers paying them 200% price above the market price, costing the Thai government $15 billion this year. “If allowed to happen, rice import has a potential of scuttling the bold drive of the government to make Nigeria self-sufficient in rice.”
The rice importers, Adesina argued, simply want to take advantage of huge profits they would make from the cheap rice imports to harp on the need to lower rice tariffs.
The Minister said Nigeria is not an exemption in using high tariffs on rice. All over the world, rice is the most protected and subsidized of all commodities, with tariffs, tariff-rate quotas and tariff escalation for processing and value added.
According Adesina , information being peddled by rice importers and rice processors that Nigeria is not producing enough paddy is wholesomely incorrect and mischievous. Declaring that he had commissioned an independent USAID-Markets program and the Africa Rice Center to verify the situation, which shows that there is sufficient paddy available, but the problem was accessibility by millers. While farmers complain of paddy glut, millers complain of lack of enough paddy.
Accessibility was linked to high cost of paddy, long distances between production zones and location of mills, high transport cost from the production zones to the location of their mills, variable quality of paddy due to high moisture content or poor cleaning, lack of standardization of bags (farmers insist on selling in 75 kg bags instead of 100 kg bags or by weight), lack of storage facilities to stock up on paddy and limited financing to buy up the paddy rice., the minister disclosed.