FG sets 4-year target to end huge import bill on agric products

Federal Government says the huge import bill incurred from the importation of agriculture products, particularly rice, will come to an end in the next four years when the country hopes to achieve self-sufficiency in the production of local staples such as cassava, rice, sorghum, millet, wheat, fruits and vegetables, among others.

Government hopes that through the cooperative efforts of all key stakeholders in the agricultural sector, who are expected to key into its vision on agriculture and also help to actualise it, it will also conserve foreign exchange for deployment to areas of strategic importance, and improve on its employment generation capacity, especially for youths.

“Our priority over the next four years is the achievement of self-sufficiency,” Audu Ogbeh, minister for agriculture, said at a forum in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital recently, saying government was also prioritising enhancement of agro production for export in areas it had comparative advantage – cocoa, coffee, kolanut, cotton, cashew, tea, sesame, soya, fruits and vegetables, banana, onions, pineapples, ogbono, gum Arabic, etc.

Ogbeh recalled that at independence, Nigeria was a world-leading exporter of many cash crops including groundnut, palm oil, cocoa and cotton, till the subsequent period of petroleum resource dominance that overshadowed the agricultural sector for many decades.

The South Western geo-political zone of the country, he said, financed most of its development programmes with earnings from the agricultural sector, which made it a pacesetter in many areas of human endeavour in the country, stressing that the country urgently needed to recover lost grounds in these areas given that it controlled a sizeable share of the global market for these crops in the past.

“We believe that the various measures that we are putting in place to re-energise the production of these crops in larger volumes, both as raw materials for home industries, and as exports, will help to restore our market share within the next two to four years,” he said.

Continuing, he said: “Given its proximity to Lagos State and the investment-friendly disposition of the state which has attracted more corporate organisations and industries into it lately, it is evident that Ogun State will be a key beneficiary of this policy drive of enhanced agro production and export in our areas of comparative advantage.”

Ibikunle Amosu, the state governor, had in his remarks at the forum, said the state’s vision for agriculture included expansion into agro-processing industries along the value chain, pointing out that presently only about 20 percent of the state’s farm produce was processed while the rest was either sold as cash crops or left to rot due to insufficient processing capacity.

“Some of the areas in agriculture that present the most viable business opportunities for investors are palm oil/palm kernel, rubber, aquaculture and livestock, and among the diverse uses of palm kernel and palm oil are as natural cooking oil, vegetable-based soap, cosmetic toilet soap, and feed stock for bio-diesel production,” he said.

The minister assured that government was addressing the issues of certification, quality control and packaging, which had either led to under-pricing or rejection of some of the country’s agricultural exports in the past, explaining that part of this measure entailed replacing the use of polypropylene bags with jute bags for packaging.

“This, hopefully, should lead to the creation of thousands of on-farm jobs through the production of Kernaf as raw materials for making jute bags; this is a huge window of opportunity for inflow of investment,” he said.