The Federal Government has vowed to go after rice importers who enjoyed waivers to import but exceeded the quota granted them.
Speaking in Abuja yesterday during a stakeholders’ meeting with officials of Paddy Rice Producing States and Rice Value Chain Investors, the Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Mr Godwin Emefiele, said the government has resolved “to go after rice importers who defaulted in the payment of customs duty after bringing in excess quotas of the product into the country at concessionary rates.”
The CBN he said would take the matter with President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure that the money is paid. Emefiele said: “By exceeding their import quota, these rice importers have flooded the Nigerian market with rice that are sold below what is produced locally thus making consumers to ignore the locally produced ones. Go and pay; you are taking a big risk and don’t wait for the big stick to be wielded on you. Just go and pay.”
He assured the rice producers that the bank would work closely with the Nigerian Customs Service to address the issue of smuggling.
Earlier, Emefiele had said $2.41 billion was spent by Nigeria to import rice into the country between January 2012 and May this year. To this end, he said there will be no reversal of the ban on forex for importation of certain items stressing that “those who are nursing the thought that the bank’s decision on forex ban for importation of rice, fish and other items would be reversed should forget such as the bank has no plans to do so.”
He lamented that the massive importation of rice “had resulted in huge unsold stock of paddy rice cultivated by our farmers and low operating capacities of many integrated rice mills in Nigeria.”
To support local production of rice, Emefiele said the CBN, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has agreed to come up with a comprehensive financing model to support rice millers and other investors in the sector.
The need to intervene in the sector with this funding and other packages Emefiele said “was borne out of the fact that the country can never achieve its true potentials by importing everything it can produce locally.”
The CBN he said would make funds available to rice farmers through some of its funding programmes such as the Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme and the N220 billion Micro Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund.
This fund, he said “would be made available to the rice farmers through the Microfinance Banks at an interest rate of nine percent” but he urged farmers to report to the CBN any microfinance bank that charges interests above the stipulated rate.
The CBN governor appeal to state governments “to provide lands for the farmers on a large scale and we will work with them to clear some of these impediments. We are at a stage where we must feed our selves and all hands must be on deck to ensure this works.”
Kebbi State Governor, Alhaji Atiku Bagudu, who spoke on behalf of the 10 major paddy rice producing states of Kebbi, Kaduna, Katsina, Jigawa, Sokoto, Ebonyi, Taraba, Zamfara, Nasarawa and Niger, assured that they would do everything possible to support the CBN intervention.
He said rice producing states in Nigeria “have enough capacity to produce rice that would help the country attain self-sufficiency as well as for export purpose.”
Earlier, the rice millers had called on the government to address some of the bottlenecks affecting rice production in Nigeria. The areas they identified include bigger fields for production, funding, access to land, establishment of more rice mills, increase in capacity of existing mills, investment in research, irrigation facility, stable rice policy that would be agreed to by all stakeholders and the need to tackle issue of smuggling.
No comments:
Post a Comment