Agric Minister Reveals A Bag Of Rice May Sell For N40,000 By December

Nigeria’s Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, has revealed the price a bag of rice may hit N40,000 by December, owing to the country’s extreme dependence on importation and inability to produce substantial quantity of the food commodity locally.

According to reports, disclosing this during the weekend at a town hall meeting in Yenogoa, Bayelsa State, the Minister said:

“For your information, we spend about $22bn a year importing food into Nigeria. We know how many more dollars … and that is why you see the price of rice going up.

Price of rice was N12,000 some months ago, but it is now about N26,000 and if we don’t start producing, by December it could be N40,000.

Rice matures in three months. So, this is a wake up call for Bayelsa people to take the four farms we have seriously. The federal government has four farms in the state in our records. The average land you see in Bayelsa can grow rice, so the colonial masters were not wrong in their assessment when they said Niger Delta could feed not only Nigeria but the entire West Africa sub-region.

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Unfortunately, agriculture till today, is not a priority of the Niger Delta as far as the state governments are concerned because of oil.”

He also disclosed that there was a projection that by 2050, Nigeria’s population would hit 450 million and he wondered what would happen then, considering the country’s current inability to sustain its population through its local food production.