President Muhammadu Buhari’s ‘’rice revolution’’ is laudable. Before the ‘’crop rebellion’’, Nigeria spent about $1.65 billion annually importing rice from Thailand and India. But the country is not yet home and dry in food production.

In December 2018, Godwin Emefiele, governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said as of 2015, the country’s food import bill was $7.9 billion, but that the figure plummeted to $1.6 billion in 2018.

However in September, 2018, Audu Ogbe, former minister of agriculture, put Nigeria’s annual food import bill at $22 billion. The fact is, Nigeria was spending its future away importing food.

It is for this exigent reason Buhari’s directive to CBN ‘’to stop providing foreign exchange for importation of food into the country’’ is apropos. As he said, ‘’the foreign reserve will be conserved and utilised strictly for diversification of the economy, and not for encouraging more dependence on foreign food import bills.”

But what is our obsession with rice?

Do not get me wrong. The rice revolution is a good one. Nigeria’s dependence on foreign rice is whittling and our production capacity is burgeoning.

At the 25th edition of the Nigeria Media Merit Award (NMMA), President Buhari accentuated this feat.

He said: ‘’Rice importation from Thailand fell from 644,131 tons in September 2015 to 20,000 tons in September 2017, representing a 95 per cent drop. Self-sufficiency in rice is so important because it is the most widely consumed staple in Nigeria, and also because Nigeria’s daily expenditure on rice for over three decades stood at $5 million a day!”

Also, figures from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) showed that rice production has increased from an average of 7.1 million tonnes between 2013 and 2017 to 8.9 million tonnes in 2018.

But rice is not Nigeria’s only biggest import. Some of the country’s other huge food imports are sugar, wheat and fish. Of the quoted annual import bill of $22 billion, these commodities bite off a chunk.

According to Adekunle Oresegun, director of Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research Lagos, Nigeria spends about $1 billion annually on the importation of fish. This is about the same amount the country spent importing rice yearly.

“The truth of the matter is that Nigeria spends about one billion dollars annually on importation of fish. Because of our fish production deficiency in Nigeria, we want to increase the number of people who have the knowledge and skills to farm fish. The intention of this vocational training is to increase fish production,’’ the director said at a training in Ebonyi state.

READ MORE: https://thebelltimesng.com/2019/10/23/nigerians-shall-not-live-on-rice-alone/

So true. Rather than focus on one food, we ought to consider agriculture as a whole.