FG doesn’t want farmers to lose – Dr. Olumeko-by Ahmed Agbo

 Dr. Jide Olumeko is the Director, Strategic Grains Reserve Department of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. In this interview, he told Food Farm News that the Federal government is making concerted efforts to ensure that Nigerian farmers do not sell at a loss. He said grain aggregation centres will be set up across the country to mop up excess farm produce.

Could you please tell us the capacity of the silos you have across the country?

The total storage capacity of all the 33 silos complexes that we have in Nigeria now is 1.36 million metric tonnes.

  

What quantity of food do you have in the reserve presently?

Well, for strategic and security reasons, I will only be able to give you the types of food but not the quantity. But I can assure you that we have sizeable quantity in the reserve for Nigeria. We have seven commodities, six are in reserve, the seventh one we have just announced the Guaranteed Minimum Price (GMP) for it. We have maize, we have paddy rice, we have sorghum, we have millet, we have soyabeans, and we have gari also. But the National Committee on Guaranteed Minimum Price has just announced the GMP for High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF). High Quality Cassava Flour is not in the reserve because it has just been listed and is an industrial product to be used by the flour millers. So, it is meant for production of composite flour in Nigeria.

Where exactly are the silos located?

We have 33 of them like I said earlier. Under phase one (1), we have them in 12 states namely; Kaduna, Ebonyi, Jigawa, Gombe, Edo, Niger, Benue, Oyo, Kwara, Plateau, Cross River and Ondo. The second phase, we have them in 20 states; Katsina, Osun, Adamawa, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kogi, Bauchi, Taraba, Borno and Abuja the FCT. Other states are Yobe, Zamfara, Kano, Nasarawa, Anambra, Imo, Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, Ogun and Ekiti.

In phase two (2) they are at various stages of completion. Out of the 20, we have completed nine and commissioned one. Eight are waiting for commissioning. So, the remaining 11 are at different stages of completion.

Rice farmers in some parts of the country, especially in the Northern states where the federal government encouraged them to plant rice last year are complaining that they can’t get buyers, what can you say about that?

Yes, I will say under the GES we encouraged farmers to plant rice. We have two farming seasons now in Nigeria. Before, we were only depending on wet farming season, but now with the current minister’s intervention, we have two planting seasons; the wet and the dry farming seasons. So, during the dry season we were able to produce a lot of rice as you have rightly mentioned. But the Honourable Minister has directed that we should mop up the excess paddy in the country and we have purchased about 15,000 metric tonnes in our silos complex in Sokoto. We have dedicated the silos complex in Sokoto for mopping up of paddy rice in the country. It’s an ongoing exercise. We will still continue to mop up the paddy rice. The minister doesn’t want our farmers to lose. We want our farmers to have appreciable profit from their sales. So, he has directed us to buy the excess at the guaranteed minimum price.

When did you buy the paddy rice?

We just concluded the first purchases about two months ago. The dry season farming is on and by April or May when we have the harvest; we will be able to buy again. Initially we don’t go to the market to buy directly. We have to allow the large scale integrated millers to buy first. So, when we have excess, that is when we will now move to the market to mop it up from the farmers.

The feelers we have indicate that many rice farmers may abandon their farms this year as a result of poor market; I don’t know if your purchases are making the desired impact?

Well, apart from the mopping up we are doing now, we also have another programme which we call Grains Aggregation Centres. We are proposing to have 56 of them in the country. We are starting within the next one month. The purpose is to buy grains from the farmers. Government is not going to run them. It’s going to be private sector led, government is to provide enabling environment for the private sector to operate. We are going to establish the centres in rice producing areas. A farmer will not have to travel more than 10 kilometres to get to the centre where the paddy rice will be bought. At the aggregation centres, we will have complete sets of equipment for cleaning, drying and bagging. We will also have records of farmers that have brought the grains. The idea is just for us to map the farmers under the GES programme that we are running and for them to know where they will sell their produce. I will say may be in about six to seven months from now, the word glut may likely not exist again because the farmers have where to sell. The large scale integrated millers will now have where to buy their paddy rice from.

Have you started creating awareness about the programme?

Yes we have started. People from the private sector that are interested in running them have already expressed interest. By the time we complete, I believe within the next six to eight weeks, they will be operational and we will be able to purchase the grains from the farmers and aggregate the grains and bring them to the required standard and the right quality that the millers want.

There is this issue of rice self-sufficiency and ban on importation of rice earlier targeted at 2015 and we are already in the year 2015, do you think the federal government can achieve that target? 

You know in the earlier discussion you made mention of glut, that means our farmers are producing paddy rice. I will say that there is still a shortfall, but the government is trying all its best to ensure that the shortfall is met by our local farmers. I can assure you that by the end of the year that shortfall will be probably reduced to a minimal figure that we can manage. But I know we are producing and we will produce enough to feed this country especially with the FARO 44 and FARO 52 long grain new varieties of rice that have been introduced.

On a Radio Nigeria programme known as ‘Politics Nationwide’ the agriculture minister recently said Nigeria will be rice self-sufficient and export rice to other countries in the next three years, why are they shifting the rice self-sufficiency target from 2015?

No. we are not shifting it. We have our own data; we have the list of farmers that we are supporting. The minister has a master plan on how to exit importation of rice by this country and he is following up his programme religiously. I will say initially we had the plan of producing enough this year, but as you know we are trying to meet that target. I think what the minister said is that in three years’ time we will be exporting rice to other countries. I think within the next one year or thereabout we should be self-sufficient in rice production. After that, the next stage is for us to export rice to other countries.

You earlier mentioned High Quality Cassava Flour as one of your mandate commodities and bakers have since been directed to include about 20% of it in bread, are you sure there is cassava bread in the market?   

Yes, I will tell you that even every bag of flour that you have in the country now has a quantity of cassava flour in them. The minister also has a programme where they are training bakers on how to produce cassava bread. They have trained them in all the states and I can assure you that all those master bakers are producing cassava bread in the country. If you go to Shoprite you will see cassava bread. Apart from Shoprite other major shops in the country have cassava bread on their shelves.       

The President recently announced that N26 billion will be released for this year’s dry season farming, but the dry season is far spent, if the money is released will it meet the desired objective?

Whatever the President says he is going to fulfill it. The President made the pronouncement at the agric festival that we just had and we have started dry season farming. We have started with four crops. The dry season farming programme is on and we will be able to meet the objectives. So, I will say, Mr. President, what he has pronounced he will do. The government is so concerned about farmers; we want our farmers to become millionaires like farmers in other countries.