Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has said that Nigeria can now produce wheat economically and this means that very soon local farmers will be able to compete with imported wheat.
Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr. Sonny Echono, said this during the first Annual General Meeting of the Nigerian Agribusiness Group (NABG).
He 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.
“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.
“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.”
On the recent European Union ban on Nigerian foods, he said “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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