...Says Nigeria Can Achieve Food Security If Resources Are Properly Harnessed
President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday said the country has the capacity to achieve self-sufficiency in food production and security if human and material resources are rightly harnessed and deployed.
Speaking while inaugurating the Large-Scale Integrated Rice Mill, located in Sheda, Kwali, Federal Capital Territory (FCT), he said his administration had in the past eight years intensively promoted and supported agricultural development through the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) Anchor Borrower Programme (ABP), the Fertilizer Initiative, Grain Aggregation Centres and Special Agro-industrial Processing Zone Programme.
Buhari said the measures were in line with the food security component of his government’s nine-priority agenda for agriculture, adding that the agricultural development strategy had so far enabled the increased output recorded in critical arable and cash crops production.
Represented at the occasion by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Mohammad Abubakar, Buhari pointed out that the new rice mill was just one of the 10 mills embarked upon by the current administration for the purpose of expanding domestic rice production and achieving self-sufficiency in the country.
He said, “This accomplishment clearly demonstrates our commitment to addressing critical infrastructural projects and keeping with the ideals of the Change Agenda to ensure prudence in the management of public resources, value for money considering the huge investments in this project.
“We have witnessed the rapid increase in domestic rice production from the incentive given to farmers and processors over this period as a resolution of leveraging our potential, producing what we consume, and patronise locally made products.
“In the agricultural sector, we indeed have the capacity to be food secure if we rightly harness and deploy our human and material resources.”
Buhari said the establishment of large-scale integrated rice processing mills located across the North West, North East, North Central, SouthSouth and South West Zones of the country further demonstrated the commitment of his administration to reposition agriculture.
According to him, the concept was a public, private partnership between the government and the anchor investors to increase the country’s processing capacity for rice production and fill up the demand-supply gap making the country self-sufficient in the commodity value chain.
He pointed out that the country’s paddy yield per hectare significantly increased to the extent of being adequate in the raw material production, adding that it showed the result of determination for backward integration and economic diversification within the ambit of comparative advantage of natural resource utilisation.
He further urged encourage every Nigerian to invest in any aspect of the agricultural value chain by using the available incentives, undertaking agribusiness and aiding food production in the country, stressing that this would “demonstrate our collective stake of developing the sector and providing food for the teeming population.”