to invest massively in local rice production. The ultimate target was to achieve a total rice import replacement by 2020. But, smuggled foreign rice, primarily sourced from Thailand and India, has continued to flood Nigeria, through her borders with Benin, Niger and Cameroon. The lower landing cost for the foreign brands is crippling local producers and frustrating the government’s rice self-sufficiency target.
Also, while Nigeria’s current rice consumption is put at between six and seven million MT of milled rice, the country produced 2.5m MT of milled rice in 2015. By 2017, it rose to 4m MT , leaving a gap of 2m MT. So, when Buhari rode on the back of the just-concluded Seventh Tokyo International Conference for African Development in Yokohama, Japan, where he granted audience to Talon, to express serious concern over the smuggling of rice into Nigeria, he wanted to pull the breaks on what he, and perhaps, other concerned stakeholders perceive as deliberate sabotage.
Although Buhari said the partial closure of the western border was to allow Nigeria’s security forces develop a strategy on how to stem the dangerous trend and its wider ramifications, operators and industry stakeholders fear that such strategy, if, and when developed and implemented, might be belated.
He also said the impending illegal rice importation would, no doubt, have a ripple effect on local rice processors, as their activities would be hampered. Although he said RIPAN supports the border closure, Maifata said it would go a long way in curbing the menace of rice smuggling, while giving local producers a breather.Indeed, breather came the way of local rice producers since 2015 when the Federal Government banned the importation of rice into the country.
Most of the imports by Benin are allegedly for Nigerians. As Nigeria’s rice import falls, Benin’s rice import increases. Most of the parboiled rice imported by Benin eventually lands in Nigeria through smuggling. As if this is not enough discouragement, Thailand and India where the smuggled rice is sourced also gave a high level of subsidies to rice farmers and rice processors, local rice producers in Nigeria are struggling to compete favourably in terms of pricing with the heavily subsidised imported rice.
“These are countries with lower import tariffs and porous borders, creating conditions favourable for transshipments, the report said, adding that Thai and Indian-origin rice dominate imports into Nigeria, which largely comprise parboiled rice .
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