FG to save $4.6bn on wheat importation via local production

Audu Ogbeh, minister of agriculture and rural development, on Tuesday, said the Federal Government would be saving $4.6 billion from wheat importation, as Lake Chad Research Institute in Maiduguri, had come up with a new variety of improved seedling, already accepted by farmers.

Nigeria’s annual food importation bill is currently put at $20 billion, with wheat importation taking its toll on the depletion of the foreign exchange, which is largely unsustainable, amid dwindling revenue resources, arising from the plummeting oil price.

To this, Ogbeh said the Federal Government was prepared to expand such initiative by deepening researches in other varieties of agricultural value chains, a move the Minister said would involved bringing back agricultural research institutes to consolidate researches in other varieties of identified seedlings for food sufficiency and growth of the economy.

“We are currently doing soil mapping, and would be distributing variety of seeds to farmers, which would address other sectors in the agricultural value chain, there by sustaining the livelihood of large percentage of our rural dwellers, who largely depend on agriculture for their livelihood,” Ogbeh said.

Ogbeh, while speaking further on initiative of the Federal Government to attract more youths in agriculture said: “The current set of farmers we have are already aging, and we are coming up with an initiative called Labour intensive Family Enterprise, ‘LIFE’, which is a programme designed to attract more youth and women into the agricultural sector.”

Meanwhile, Olabanji Oluwasina, executive director of Lake Chad Research Institute Maiduguri, told BusinessDay that the research on the variety of the variety of wheat commenced in 1987, but with improved research and persistence, the institute came up with the variety with the botanical name: “Triticum aestivum,” which according to him has been widely accepted by farmers.

Further findings revealed that Nigeria requires 4 million metric tonnes of wheat annually for self sufficiency in wheat production, as available records, show wheat farmers cultivate only 350 000 metric tons, leaving a wider gap of 3.65 million metric tonnes of wheat to be explored through cultivating larger expanse of land in the sector.

“We have the land, especially in the North East for such cultivation, we believe that youths all over the country could take advantage of these gap and fill it, and make much money for themselves, and make our nation self sufficient in wheat productions,” he said.