The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has flagged-off the first ever rain-fed wheat programme in the country, which aims to slash the importation of wheat by 60 per cent in two years.
The initiative is also expected to save the country about $2 billion annually in foreign exchange.
Speaking in Jos, Plateau State, during the unveiling ceremony for the Nigerian Brown Revolution, which is a Central Bank wheat value chain intervention, CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele, said following the successes in the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP), the apex bank decided to extend the gains recorded in the rice and maize value chains to wheat production.
He said the plan was to ultimately eliminate wheat importation or reduce it to an insignificant contributor to the country’s total food import bill, adding that the wheat programme would benefit over 150,000 farmers.
He also said the programme would be implemented in 15 states on over 180,000 hectares of land.
Emefiele said the programme would address the impact of wheat importation on foreign exchange.
Represented at the occasion by CBN Deputy Governor, Corporate Services Directorate, Mr. Edward Adamu, the CBN Governor said the country spends about $2 billion annually in importing 5.2 metric tonnes of the wheat to meet local demand.
Emefiele said the programme was expected to add about 2,000 metric tons of seeds to the nation’s national seed stock and potentially add 750,000 metric tons of wheat to national output annually through rain-fed wheat cultivation in Plateau, Mambila Plateau and Obudu Plateau in the short-term.
Emefiele said wheat remain the third most widely consumed grain in the country after maize and rice.
He said the country only produces about one per cent (63,000 metric tons) of the 5-6 million metric tons of the commodity consumed annually in Nigeria.
The CBN Governor said the enormous demand-supply gap was bridged with over $2 billion spent annually on wheat importation, making wheat the second highest contributor to the country’s food import bill.
He said given the high growth rate of the country’s population and the demographic structure, the demand for wheat was projected to continue to rise, thereby intensifying pressure on the country’s reserves unless a decisive step is taken to grow the commodity locally.
Emefiele added that over the years, the availability of low-yielding seeds variety locally and poor agronomic practices had hampered successful cultivation of wheat in the country, leading to low productivity as well as making wheat production unappealing to farmers and unattractive for private sector investment.
He said the CBN, in order to change the narrative and leverage domestic production to bridge the demand-supply gap in the country, decided to add wheat to the list of local commodities to be supported under the bank’s agricultural intervention programmes.
” Improved seeds varieties constitute the bedrock of any crop production process” He added that the country had made some progress with regards to acquisition of high yielding varieties from Mexico with potential average yield per hectare of 5-7 metric tons as against a range of 0.8-1.8 metric tons yield per hectare of those varieties previously cultivated.
Emefiele said the two-pronged approach of seed multiplication and grains production already adopted is expected to sustain the propagation of seeds and guarantee availability of high-yielding seeds to farmers.
He said the CBN’s strategy for the wheat value chain involved ensuring availability of high-yield seeds by financing seed multiplication and establishment of seed ripple centres.
Other are expanding land under cultivation for wheat to a capacity that could meet total national demand through association and collaboration with relevant federal agencies and state governments.
He said the strategy was to also pursue strategic collaboration with key stakeholders in the wheat value chain for sustained local production.
Source: Thisday Newpapers
