Commendable!

http://www.punchng.com/business/industry/food-import-bill-drops-by-n466bn/

Nigeria’s food import bill has declined by N466bn within the last three years, the Federal Government has said.

According to the government, the agricultural sector added N780bn to Nigeria’s economy during the period.

The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, disclosed this during the inauguration of the first commercial 10 per cent composite cassava flour product from Flour Mills of Nigeria and the Honeywell Group in Abuja recently.

He said the food import bill declined from N1.1tn in 2011 to N634bn by the end of 2013, adding that the decline had continued.

Adesina said, “Our farmers are seeing the benefits and they are producing more food. Our national food production expanded by an additional 21 million metric tons of food within three years. This is a record in our nation’s history.

“The agricultural transformation agenda has added N780bn to the economy within the past three years. And our aggressive approach to ensure that we process and add value to all our crops is beginning to open up new income streams for our farmers.”

The minister noted that all bread, cakes and confectioneries consumed in Nigeria were made of at least 10 per cent of cassava flour.

Adesina said, “All bread being consumed in Nigeria now contains cassava flour. And all cakes and confectioneries you eat now contain cassava flour. (What) you are eating everyday therefore (is) cassava bread and cassava cakes. What a change!

“The landscape of cassava in Nigeria has been changed forever. No more will cassava be seen as a subsistence crop for household and village-level processing. Cassava has now become the raw material of choice for the burgeoning bread flour, sweetener, starch, and ethanol markets.

“With these strong growth markets, the teeming millions of our cassava farmers will have a market that will stabilise prices and provide strong incentives to invest in inputs and global best practices to increase their productivity and secure their livelihoods.”

Adesina said the Federal Government started the cassava bread journey three years ago and was faced with various obstacles such as claims that cassava causes diabetes, “claims that the bread would be of such low quality that some named it ‘akpu bread,’ and the challenges of establishing a strong seed system for a vegetatively propagated crop.”

He added, “But today we have surmounted all those obstacles. We have silenced the scare mongers by demonstrating that cassava bread is healthier than pure white wheat flour bread.”