Nigeria, others to import $110b worth of food by 2025

Nigeria and other African countries will import food valued at $110 billion by 2025, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), has said.

Its Director, Development and Delivery, Dr. Alfred Dixon who spoke in Abuja at the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between IITA and Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) said the essence of the collaboration is to scale up on agricultural technology in the country.

Dr Dixon said so far Africa imports $35 billion worth of food, warning that if nothing was done about this, by 2025, the continent will be importing $110 billion worth of food annually.

Also speaking on the occasion, Head of Station at IITA, Prof. Lateef Sanni, said the crisis between Russia and Ukraine would threaten the import and availability of not only wheat but soyabeans, fertilizer, potash and phosphate in the country.

He said the annual demand for wheat in Nigeria is about six million metric tons with the country importing 11 per cent of it from the two countries.

He also said between 40 and 50 per cent of the soyabeans consumed in the country also comes from the two countries, including fertilizers, potash and phosphate.

Prof Sanni said the current crisis and global recession has already caused scarcity of commodities which will lead to high prices and food insecurity.

He said: “The current crisis in the world either COVID-19, Ukraine/Russia crises and the global recession has already caused the scarcity of commodities, it has its ripple effect on high prices which affects food security, so the point is how to wrap up local production to some of the shortfalls.

“For instance we take about the 11 per cent of wheat from Russia and Ukraine together as a nation and our annual wheat demand is around six million, today CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria) has supported about 800,000 out of the number. For soyabeans, more than 40-50 per cent comes from Ukraine and Russia, also includes fertilizers, potash and phosphate, so the essence is on how to wrap up production? IITA over the years has developed modern technology and practices that we can scale up, so interacting with Nigeria Agribusiness Group is to be able to work together and synergies actions, strategies to scale up and reach millions of small holder farmers. So the modalities will be ensuring the private sector takes up the interventions.”

Dr Dixon believes that NAGB can become a powerful voice to promote agricultural transformation, which is the reason for the partnership.

He said: “The MoU is to ensure we work with NABG to capitalize on scaling of agricultural technologies in Nigeria, so that Nigeria can achieve agricultural transformation because Africa imports $35 billion worth of food and if nothing is done about it, by 2025, we will be importing $110 billion and Nigeria is a major contributing factor to the importation because of the population, when we do that, we are actually exporting our jobs.

“Jobs that people should do to produce what we want, we are exporting to other countries that pay their own people to do and export to us; we are not helping ourselves. So given all that is happening in the world, we must turn back to local production.”

President of NABG, Dr. Emmanuel Ijewere said Nigeria is presently trying to supplement its wheat import by teaching farmers how to plant tropical wheat which formerly was not common in this region.

“On the effects of the Russia/Ukraine crises and the aspect of wheat production, a lot has been done in Nigeria for some time now as if we were anticipating such, the major effect of the crisis in Nigeria is on wheat but as far as wheat is concerned, so much work has been done over the years that wheat we thought over the years cannot be grown in tropical countries, we now have tropical wheat and organizations like flour mills are already training farmers on it, so what we are saying is that Nigeria was not asleep, it’s just that we did not wake up early enough, so this has awakened us the more.