The Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, has announced that local rice is expensive in Nigeria, and will soon be sold for a fortune, because of low milling capacity.
Osinbajo, spoke at the Presidential Villa, in Abuja, while receiving a portal donated by the management of a commercial bank, for use in the monitoring and evaluation of the home-grown school feeding programme.
Whie speaking, he said: “Our economic recovery and growth plan really does assume a lot of private sector participation. And that participation, we expect it to be real, and this is the sort of thing we are talking about.
“In agriculture, we recognise now that we have got to be able to produce enough rice for our people, between now and possibly the end of 2018.
“We must absolutely stop importation of rice; there is no reason a country of our size with all the arable land that we have, cannot produce enough rice for our own consumption, and of course export as time goes on.
“Looking at our milling capacity, which is one of the reasons we are not getting enough rice to the markets, the milling capacity is quite low.
“But there are a few private sector individuals and companies that are coming into milling now, but we really need game-changing activity in that respect.”
Besides, he extended the government’s appreciation to the bank on the donation of the portal that would capture the data of school children, while urging other corporate firms to emulate the gesture.
