Address Root Cause of Smuggling, LCCI Tells FG

The Director-General, Lagos Chamber of Commerce, (LCCI), Muda Yusuf, has called on the federal government to address the root cause of rice smuggling, rather than the border closure policy of the government which he said is not a sustainable solution.

He explained that there is need for government to address challenges as the domestic capacity to produce competitively in quality and price, infrastructure and connectivity in moving the product from one part of the country to another and others.

Yusuf disclosed this yesterday in Lagos during the 2019 Business Forum Between Nigeria and South Korea organised by Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, with the theme: ‘Sustainable Business for Economic Development’

He further urged the government to bring in technology into agriculture and encourage more commercial farming, while building domestic capacity in rice production.

He added that government should change tariffs, stating that domestic import tariffs are too high.

“How can you have tariffs of 30-70 per cent even for intermediate products? Our ports are in a very bad shape.”

Continuing, Yusuf said: “We have to deal with fundamental issues otherwise you make the citizens to suffer unnecessarily.

We need to create infrastructure for agriculture to support the population, and instead of closing the border, which is creating more poverty. Let’s address the insecurity situations across our border. You cannot say institutions have failed and get citizens to pay the price of those institutions. We have a lot of legitimate exporters who exports products to the West African sub regions, their businesses are down and people are suffering.”