Mr. Shedrack Madlion |
A Kaduna
based practicing farmer, Mr. Shedrack Madlion has described the Federal Government’s
pronouncement on bringing down the prices of food stuff in two weeks as another
statement of hope that was far from reality. He said this in an exclusive
telephone chat with Food Farm News.
He said it
was impossible for the government to achieve the proposed reduction in price
within two weeks as Agric minister, Chief Audu Ogbeh’s announced in an exclusive
recently in an interview with Leadership
newspaper.
He queried
the scientific strategies that were in place to achieve the set goal and
lamented the hardship Nigerians were facing as the inflation rate continues to
skyrocket.
He described
the statement of the minister as just mere hope that cannot translate to
reality asking “how could a nation with an inadequate numbers of tractors, and
declining 47% agricultural activities in the year 2016 and 2017 be able to
checkmate high food prices in two week?”, adding “what magic did government
want to perform to achieve the goal?”
Madlion
said: “hope is not a strategy, and the absence of strategy in life is tragedy.
The food requirement in Nigeria as at today has not been met by the government,
this I can tell you. How will the price of food drop where the country do not
have a functional 400,000 tractors? How will the food prices drop when there is
decline of 47% in rural farmers’ participation in agricultural activities
between 2016 and 2017? How would the price of food drop when 14 million
children are in Internally Displaced Camps (IDPs) doing no farming activities
as they have not been properly settled down. I am talking of those people in
the North East. How can the price of food drop when roads network and rural
feeder roads are still the same since the 1967 and the 1980s without any
addition? So, by the pronouncement of the Minister of Agriculture, Nigerians
should ask what the strategies are for the food price fall when army worm has
ravaged many maize farms as maize is being imported to fill the short fall of
10 million metric tons of 25 million so as to meet the national demand of 35
million metric tons”
The Kaduna
based farmer said with the empty national silos; the failure of the Central
Bank of Nigeria (CBN)’s anchor borrower programme; the driving away of Benue
farmers from farms and unverified success recorded by Lagos and Kebbi states in
the Lake Rice projects, it would be impossible to reduce food prices saying “the anchor programme is a failure. Ask Lagos state how many
paddy of rice she got back in the Memorandum of Understanding signed on kebbi
state rice”
He added: “A basket of tomato in Port Harcourt
is N16,400.00 in Ibadan N14,300.00; Mile 12,Lagos, N17.500.00, and in Kano,
N12.000.00; while a tuber of yam in Kaduna is
N530.00, Bida, Niger state N210.00, Port Harcourt is N1,200.00”
He noted
that many lives had been lost to farmers/herdsmen clashes and rustlers attack
alongside kidnapping of people from the farms for ransom, which had taken a
declining toll on the production capacity of food crops.
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