Nigeria Can Eliminate Rice Importation With Right Policies – Idinoba

Dr Philip Idinoba

Dr Philip Idinoba,a rice commodity specialist with AfricaRice provides insight into Nigeria’s rice production challenges concluding that Nigeria can overcome its rice imports challenges with strict political will and right policies.- Ruth Tene Natsa.

What do you mean by Rice Science, are you into genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?
Rice science is an all-embracing subject, it describes the application of scientific tools and methods in the genetic improvement and conservation of rice germplasms, the use of science in rice production, management and conservation of the production ecologies, including processing and value addition to rice and rice-based products to improve their nutritional qualities. And no, we are not into GMOs. Before the advent of GMOs which employ transgenic tools and methods in targeting and transferring desirable genes or material from one plant to another (either of the same specie or not), there were other breeding and crop improvement methods called conventional breeding and biotechnology methods which involves natural pollination and transfer of better traits from one plant to another (usually same plant types) , or the culturing and multiplication of plants from their tissues. Conventional crop breeding methods could take between 4-7 years before a breeder could breed a new crop depending on whether they have irrigation facilities to plant, cross and select the new off-spring and to repeat the process again at least twice a year or not. Biotechnology is much like conventional crop improvement but an improvement on conventional crosses and selection because it can shorten the period by using molecular tools or tissue culture in locating the desirable trait, extract and introduce it into the new plant off springs to get the desired result.

The last two, that is, conventional breeding and biotechnology are the methods used by AfricaRice and we don’t do GMOs.

Having been in Nigeria, do you see Nigeria overcoming her rice import challenges?
Overcoming rice import challenges seems different from reducing or eliminating rice imports which I think you wanted to ask. Yes, Nigeria can easily eliminate the importation of rice within just a couple of years to three year period if the right things are done. Fortunately, is relatively easy to increasing rice productivity because rice is not a complicated crop in terms of its production techniques, it responds very well to good crop management practices on the fields, the knowledge to do so is also available and it can grow in almost all Nigerian production ecologies from mangrove swamps, to rain-fed upland, rain-fed lowlands and irrigated ecologies which Nigeria has a lots of productive hectares unused and within a duration of 90 days to about 150 days for our common varieties. It is to be noted that Nigeria has come close to rice self-sufficiency twice in recent history but the election years are always a turning point of that dream. The Obasanjo government presidential initiative on rice was doing very well and moving toward rice self-sufficiency until 2003 election year when there was massive importation of rice for political campaign and election. The same happened in late 2014 to early 2015 when the rice transformation agenda of the last government was doing very well until massive imports were allowed.

What do you see as challenges to food security in Africa, particularly Nigeria?
Nigeria does not have major issue with food security if we could improve in two areas in addition to production. Those areas are aggregation or storage and of course value addition. Every year, Nigeria have relatively good output of our major commodities like Rice, Cassava, Sorghum, Maize, Cowpea, Plantains, etc, which Nigerians depend upon for household food security. However, the losses are also very high both on-farms, in transit and in storage. Post-harvest loses are between 20 to 40% for these crop due to poor handling techniques, weak market chains, low value addition and non-existent storage facilities. If we increase our value addition, diversification and improve storage facilities even at present production levels much will be saved and prices will stabilize across seasons encouraging farmers to remain in business. Agricultural prices are cyclical and this year production if influence positively or negatively by last season’s prices.

Would you say there are sufficient policies on ground to encourage local production, if not, what is lacking?
The Rice Transformation Agenda (RTA) as a component of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of the past administration was very well packaged and clear to everyone whether you were working in the Agricultural sector or not. I cannot confidently say that I know what the current policy is although the government of the day has said agriculture is a means of diversification of the economy.

This did not show in the allocation to Agriculture in this year’s budget. I think the government is still working on the policy documents and also the diversification may show in 2017 budget but not this year’s budget judging from the percent allocation to the sector.

At this point does Africa/ Nigeria have a rice deficiency and what can be done?
Yeah we have deficiency in both Nigeria and the entire Sub-Sahara Africa of which Nigeria is one of the highest importers. In Nigeria there are no clear data on this and depending on who is talking the production gap that is currently filled by is between 1.5 to 2 million metric tonnes of finished rice. By late 2014 we estimated this gap to fall within 900,000Metric tonnes and 1.3 million metric tonnes. The
massive dry season production started by the last minister of  agriculture in 2012 and support to farmers was the game changer.

However, the dry season production was not taken seriously in 2014 because of the election and the reason about disproportionate import already stated. The 2015 dry season production by the launched CBN anchor program is limited to a few states, particularly Kebbi state for rice with about 75,000 hectare. This will not have much impact in terms of volume required to close the gap because even if the average yield rises to 5 tons per ha, it will still fall below 500,000 metric tonnes of paddy. Nigeria need about 2.5 million to 3million metric tonnes of paddy to properly close the national production gap.

Briefly what should be done?
Is that there should not only be good policy but a strong political will and determination to coordinate that policy to succeed which we have lacked in many years. Government policy should touch on upgrading the technology used by local millers to produce better quality rice.
We should start from that market end and that will stimulate production, more investments on affordable irrigation facilities

How would u value the quality of our local rice and what can we do toenhance it?
I don’t want to call it local rice because there is nothing local about our rice. I will call it the Nigeria rice varieties many of which are varieties developed by AfricaRice. The Nigeria rice is of excellent in taste, texture and overall quality. However, time will be required to wean us from the Asian rice texture and taste. This is not a serious problem because if people do not see it to buy when we begin to produce enough or could only see at very expensive price in the supermarkets, the preference for imported rice will wane naturally.

What specific challenges do you see to rice development in Nigeria?
The challenges has been low political will to drive very good policies through, lack of policy continuity, limited irrigation infra-structures, poor processing method by cottage millers who currently process over 85% of our national finished rice. Upgraded these cottage mills in terms of technology  used by them to improve quality remains the fasted way to reaching national self sufficiency.