Buhari’s rice ‘success’ faces quality, pricing hurdles

Low quality and high prices of most locally parboiled rice have continued to dampen the success recorded in Nigeria’s production of the crop in recent years.

President Muhammadu Buhari had last year said his administration’s ‘rice revolution’ had made the country attain food sufficiency. He said this while unveiling 13 rice pyramids stacked with a total of about 1.2 million bags of paddy.

Despite farmers increasing rice productivity per unit area in the past seven years and mills expanding, the quality of most local brands has remained perpetually low, thus fuelling consumers’ preference for foreign varieties.

This, coupled with the high cost of production, has made Nigerian rice unable to compete favourably with varieties from Thailand, Vietnam, and India, among others, brought into the country.

“Quality is still a big issue in our local rice production. You find stones in some local varieties and most are still not good enough to make jollof rice,” Shade Kazeem, a teacher and mother of four who was at Mile 12 Market to make a purchase, told BusinessDay.

Frank Okpako, a businessman, said the high cost of Nigerian rice and poor quality have made many Nigerians stick to foreign parboiled rice.

“You can see that as soon as the borders were reopened, foreign varieties started returning to the markets. This is because there is a huge demand for it by Nigerians,” he said.

In 2019, the country shut its land borders for 16 months to tackle the high rate of smuggling – a development that led to a spike in the prices of local parboiled rice owing to production shortfall.

According to Okpako, the high demand for foreign brands is driven by better quality and pricing. “Until the quality of our local rice is improved to the standard of foreign varieties and the pricing can compete, only then can the momentum of the agric revolution success be sustained.”

He added that smuggling has continued due to the huge demand and high preference of Nigerians for foreign varieties.

Kazeem and Okpako are among millions of Nigerians who have refused to accept home-grown rice varieties owing to quality and pricing issues.

Despite rice being Buhari’s led-government top priority, thousands of smallholder farmers still cultivate the crop with hoe and cutlass in fields lacking irrigation channels.

Mills are often run on generators, while poor roads make getting the grains from the main growing areas in the northern part of the country to consumers in the South difficult and costly.

As a result, the prices are higher when compared to foreign varieties that are freighted to neighbouring countries and smuggled into the country after bribing security officials.

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A 50kg of local parboiled rice sells for an average of N36,000 for the top brands, while 50kg of long grain foreign rice sells for N34,000 and short grains for N32,000.

There are local brands that sell for N30,000, but most are of poor quality and full of stones that are detrimental to health.

Rotimi William, CEO of Kereksuk Rice Farm, said the lack of price competitiveness for Nigeria’s rice is a dent in the country’s agricultural success story.

“Our local rice cannot compete because of the high production cost,” William said, adding that the surging cost of inputs and low mechanisation are making Nigerian rice more expensive.

While there is a dearth of reliable data on just how much progress Nigeria has made in its ‘rice revolution’, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says the area under rice production grew from N3.1 million hectares in 2015 to 4.3 million hectares in 2021.

The growth, according to FAO, was encouraged by high local prices and input assistance programmes under the country’s self-sufficiency drive.

Notable in this regard is the Anchor Borrowers Programme of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which has extended support to farmers across the country.

CBN said it has committed N554.6 billion to support 3.8 million farmers under the initiative as of March 2021, with rice growers accounting for the highest percentage of recipients of the money.