Friday 14 August 2015

Nigeria Now Has Competitive Advantage in Wheat Production

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The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has stated that the nation’s locally produced wheat can now compete favourably with the imported ones, noting that courtesy of the development of two major seed varieties by the Lake Chad Research Institute, Nigeria can now save its hard earned foreign exchange used for wheat importation.


The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr. Sonny Echono, said the country now has a robust programme for wheat production, maintaining that federal government is multiplying these seeds using farmers to ensure that Nigeria is able to get enough of these seeds and later upscale in production.

The permanent secretary during the first Annual General Meeting of the Nigerian Agribusiness Group (NABG), said: “We are pleased to report that Nigeria is now able to produce wheat economically. In the past we tried to introduce wheat based on the fact that we needed to do so, but we were importing most of our wheat, draining our hard-earned foreign exchange.

“We were importing wheat because we could not produce economically due to the fact that our cost of production of wheat  per metric tonne was less than the selling price.”

According to him, “With the development of two major varieties by our Lake Chad Research Institute, we are now getting yields that will enable our wheat farmers compete with imported wheat.”

He said wheat production has received a major boost due to the sympathy and support of  millers under a policy introduced to boost self-sufficiency in rice production, which he said would also be deployed for wheat in order to protect local production.

“We want to ensure that we exhaust all the locally produced wheat before allowing the importation of the shortfall in the supply gap in the industry. We are also promoting the substitution of wheat with our cassava bread policy to reduce our dependence on wheat importation especially now that we do not have the foreign exchange to expend on this nature of import,” he added.

He noted that the federal government  is  giving farmers these seeds at a very subsidised rate up to about 80 per cent, also ensuring that  out there that if they produce wheat, we are going to buy it back from them if the industry has not absorbed it. We will give farmers the right quality of these seeds in the wheat region.

On the issue of fertilisers being bought by the state, he said it was a short-term measure to fill the gap due to the federal government’s inability to implement GES this season, saying that the scheme is a complex arrangement involving subsidies both from the federal and state governments where the farmers fund a small portion.
On the recent European Union ban on the Nigerian goods, he said it was blown out of proportion.

“It was an individual who took some beans from Nigeria to an EU country but it was not an export quantity. It is possibly for a Nigerian restaurant in the EU country. We realised that this particular consignment of beans has been kept for a very long time without proper preservation.

“We have been able to link up with them, we got all of the stakeholders in the sector, such as the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), the quarantine service and we met the EU trade mission.

“He said an error made by the federal government to remove regulatory agencies at the port was the removal of the quarantine service relying on the customs to take charge. But the reality is that the customs are not well trained ‎to test the quality of such import or export. The customs are only there to collect revenues such as import or export duties.

“We have made a strong case that just like any other countries in the world, we must have our quarantine services both at the seaports or at the airports.

“This is just a case that was overblown because we are not an exporter of this particular commodity, in fact, we are still looking at ways to meet our local demand. So, it is not a major crisis and the EU has understood our position and we are taking measures to ensure that this does not happen again.”

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