Nigeria Has Sufficient Food To Feed Citizens – FG
The Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Mohammad Abubakar, has said that the country has enough food to feed all citizens.
Abubakar said this during his presentation at the fifth edition of the “PMB Administration Scorecard 2015-2023 Series,” which took place at Radio House, Abuja on Monday.
The Minister blamed the rising cost of food in the country on inflation and the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic that forced many countries including Nigeria to shut down major economic activities for months.
He said to improve food stock in the country, the ministry is at the moment, constructing 10 large-scale integrated rice mills with 320 metric tonnes capacity per day in Jigawa, Kano, Adamawa, Niger, Kaduna, Gombe, Ekiti, Ogun, Bayelsa and the Federal Capital Territory in addition to supporting the production and distribution of breeder, foundation and certified rice seeds for farmers.
He also noted that the presidential fertilizer initiative launched in 2016 has increased the number of fertilizer plants from eight to 200 and raised production from 300,000 metric tonnes to seven million metric tonnes.
He said, “We have enough food to take care of Nigerians. We are producing food across the country and we will continue to do so to feed Nigerians in line with our mandate and expedite the transformation of the rural communities of Nigeria.
“As it is today, many parts of the world, including our own country are yet to fully recover from the negative effects of the pandemic, which has triggered inflation and high food costs across the world.
“The fact that some categories of food are imported by Nigeria is not an indication that we have food shortages. The high cost of food that we experience in the country is a result of rising inflation, which is not peculiar to Nigeria but due to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced many sectors of economic production to be shut down for many months.”
He added that the ministry was also constructing two 2000 metric tonnes specialized warehouses for the storage of food commodities at federal government-retained silo complexes in Irrua, Edo State and Ilesha, Osun State.
He further said, “One of the measures to checkmate herders’/farmers’ conflicts is the introduction of the National Livestock Development Programme and the proposal to have ranching and grazing reserves across the country.”
