Loan, grant facilities to boost Staple Crop Processing Zones

The newly announced $152.12 million loan facility and $385,000 grant by the Federal Executive Council for the Agricultural Transformation Agenda of the Federal Government is expected to boost the output of 14 Staple Crop Processing Zones in the country.

Olatokun Olusegun, acting director-general, National Agricultural Seed Council, who spoke exclusively with BusinessDay, confirmed that the loan and the grant facility would boost the Federal Government’s efforts in the establishment of 14 Staple Crop Processing Zones, through a public private partnership arrangement. Already, the Federal Government had started the process of establishing the 14 Staple Crop Processing Zones across the country with the recent addition of Olams farms in Nassarawa State.

Olusegun said: “The staple crop processing zones would concentrate on areas and regions, focusing on crops in which each region has comparative advantage. It could be rice, tomatoes, cassava, sorghum or cotton.”

To this end, Carghill, a foremost food manufacturing industry in the United States of America, had already invested N1.4 billion facility in Kogi State to set up a staple crop processing zone in the state with target of boosting rice production, aiming at Nigeria’s rice sufficiency target of 2015.

Explaining further, Olusegun said the idea of the staple crop processing zones was to boost production of crops that do very well in certain areas or regions, saying the rice sufficiency target by the Federal Government was attainable in 2015, with the improved seed variety being provided by the Federal Government to support the farmers as production was currently put at 3.3 million metric tons annually.

In addition, National Agricultural Seeds Council has been repositioned to ensure that improved variety of seeds are given to farmers to ensure that they get the best yield for their agricultural input in the country, he said.

Harrison Edeh