Prices Of Food Items To Crash In Weeks –Minister

Prices Of Food Items To Crash In Weeks –Minister

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, has assured Nigerians that high prices of foods items in the country, particularly rice, will crash in the next few weeks.
Ogbe, who revealed that the President Muhammadu Buhari led government will stop importation of rice in 2017 added that the country has enough internal production that can sustain home consumption and meet foreign exchange earnings that can guarantee diversification of the economy.
The minister stated that the federal government will sign a memoranda of understanding with Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti (ABUAD) and Ekiti State  Government in the two critical  sectors, as part of efforts to boost internal production of the commodity and enhance the country’s comparative advantages in rice and yam production.
Ogbe who made the disclosure in Ado Ekiti at the weekend during a visit to ABUAD’s farm and Ekiti State government, voiced his Ministry’s intention to supply ABUAD with 20 tonnes of rice seedlings in the next planting season to boost rice production internally.
He said the current economic recession being experienced under Buhari’s government has helped the federal government to think outside the box and had succeeded in bringing the deserved revolution to agricultural sector .
“Of recent, prices of diesel increased from N130 per litre to about N280 which makes the cost of a tractor to move up to N14 million from N7 million, the interest rate on every loan given to farmers also went up, so the aggregate  of all these factors caused increase in the prices of food items.
“We are concerned with the plights of Nigerians. We know that many are hungry but we are working round it because it doesn’t speak well of us that we are in government and people are hungry.
“But the major challenge is that Nigerians produce children more than other Africa nations put together and youths are not interested in farming and the question now is: Who will feed all these children?”
“Nigeria has about 150million people and if these people can’t be fed with food, then they will be fed with anarchy and chaos”, Ogbeh warned.
The ABUAD’s founder, Chief Afe Babalola(SAN), praised  Buhari’s administration for bringing revolution to the country’s agricultural sector that had been neglected by successive governments,  describing the current economic recession as a blessing in disguise.