As rice turns gold, Nigeria chases shadow

NIGERIA has been caught neck deep in the global rice crisis and her situation is desperate. It is not surprising. A nation that does not plan for emergencies would always find herself in the position Nigeria is today. As we groan under rice scarcity, Thailand, the Asian rice giant, might be smiling to the bank with huge income she would rake in from Nigeria. The worst way to buy anything is to beg the seller with your own money. The buyer, who is supposed to be king because he has money to spend, will now turn into a beggar. That is what we are going to do when we get to Thailand to buy rice. The government is aware of this. At the meeting of state governors with President Umaru Yar’Adua few weeks ago, it was noted that most countries had banned exportation of rice so that their people would not panic like badly-governed Nigerians.

Governor Olusegun Agagu of Ondo State, who briefed reporters after the meeting, said, “a number of countries have stopped export of rice with the exception of Thailand which has dedicated about 3.9 million metric tons of rice especially to African countries based on its sense of judgment and in the light of this development that they are more vulnerable and dependent so much on the importation of rice. So, one of the options that Nigeria is working on is the possibility of importing from Thailand.” Nigeria ’s sorrow will turn to Thailand’s gain. That is the difference between countries that plan and those that don’t. According to government, Nigeria would be importing some 500,000 metric tons of rice for this emergency period for which the government would spend about N80 billion. Maybe the whole import will come from Thailand and that is good market for the Asian rice giant.

Governor Agagu also hinted that “Thailand is supporting a rice producing group (Stallion Group) in large scale rice production in Nigeria because this is one of the medium term solutions that are to be put in place immediately in order to make sure that in the next one, two or three years, we would have got to certain level of sustainability on rice as a commodity, taking into consideration our heavy dependency on it.” That brings into consideration, the problem of local rice production. Agagu and, by extension, the government he was speaking for, made some remarks that were extremely critical in tackling the rice problem. He said “the whole essence of this importation in the short term is to create availability, to reduce this skyrocketing price. A bag of rice has gone to between N10,000 and N12,000. All we are doing is just for short term measures of three, four, five months by which the new cropping season which we are intensifying now and with all other support mechanism will lead to an enhanced production.

“One thing that should be recognised is that Nigeria has not been caught unawares. The budget we presented is a food emergency budget. All the interventions of the president has taken cognizance, long time ago, of an iminent world food crisis against which Nigeria has positioned itself to protect its citizens through enhanced production.”
There are so many problems with what the government said. Government cannot tell Nigerians that it has been promoting local production of rice because there is no evidence to support that. If local production has been receiving such support, we would not have found ourselves in this massive importation of rice scenario. If local rice is available, then let the government not bother about importing rice, but encourage its citizens to change to local rice.

But local rice is also not cheap. The problem is that there is scarcity of rice generally and not only of foreign rice. Another issues is that it is wrong for government to claim that the global crisis did not catch Nigeria unawares. There was nowhere in the budget of the preceding years or even that of 2008 where N80 billion was provided for importation of rice. Again, the problem of local production of rice is not principally that of how to process or store it. That was a reckless lie from the government. Rice is not like mango or tomato that rots few day after it is ripe. There is nowhere you can see unprocessed rice thrown away neither can you find rice in refuse bins because there is no place to keep it. The government must face the truth of its failure to make the farmer live as comfortable as the politician, contractor or civil servant who has access to oil money.

The bitter truth is that nobody will farm seriously in Nigeria as long as there are other economic activities that bring greater and less strenuous income than agriculture. When government begins to tackle this serious food crisis with lies and bogus statements as the ones reeled out by Agagu, then there is genuine fear that we would not get out of the crisis soon.