• Friday, March 29, 2024
businessday logo

BusinessDay

Wheat gulps N362bn as Nigeria’s agricultural imports remained high in 2018

Wheat-imports

Agricultural productivity in Nigeria has been growing according to rhetoric in the public sphere, but the numbers show what appears to be a different reality, suggesting production is still far from meeting local demands. Importation of agricultural goods, apart from highlighting the dearth in achieving sufficiency in local production, also indicates the huge financial opportunity that currently eludes the agricultural community in Nigeria.

BusinessDay analysis of the quarterly Foreign Trade Statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2018, has shown that importation of agricultural produce into the country steadily increased for most part of the year. Of note is wheat importation, which drove agricultural goods importation into Nigeria and accounted for N362.4 billion throughout 2018, representing 42.5 percent of the N852 billion officially captured to have been spent importing agricultural goods.

“If you look at the derivatives of wheat, it is top line food for the younger, (upper and lower) middle income class, and that population is growing,” Ayodeji Balogun, country manager, AFEX Commodities Exchange Limited, told BusinessDay. “The population of people eating pasta will continue to increase, and every sachet of Noodles is a part of wheat. That number will keep growing and wheat is not a crop we have any efficiency in producing,” he added.

The Agriculture Promotion Policy (2016 – 2020), stated annual demand for Wheat in Nigeria is 4.7 million metric tonnes whereas local production is only 60 thousand metric tonnes, leaving a deficit of 4.64 million metric tonnes driven by demand for various types of wheat (white, hard, durum), etc. for bread, biscuits and semovita.

However, according to Oluwasina Olabanji, executive director, Lake Chad Research Institute, Nigerian wheat farmers churned out less than 300,000 metric tonnes at the end of 2017/2018 farming season. Even with this, Nigeria’s wheat deficit will be at least 4.5 million metric tonnes, considering consumption would have equally gone up.

With world leader by yield, New Zealand, producing an estimated 10 metric tonnes per hectare, and in Africa, Egypt, about 7 metric tonnes per hectare, Nigeria’s wheat production yield has hovered around 2 metric tonnes per hectare. Beyond the yield, even land under cultivation is far below what is required to achieve the needed scale.

BusinessDay’s findings during a trip to Borno state last year, revealed about 67,000 hectares of land that was farmed for wheat in the Chad basin, has been uncultivated for several years now owing to the Boko Haram insurgency.

Abdulkadir Jidda, chairman, All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Borno State chapter told BusinessDay the 67,000 hectares spread across Ngara, Marte (which is the largest), to Baga, small pockets in Gamboru Ngala, and some other locations. “But, nobody can go there now,” he said.

Salim Muhammad, president, Wheat Farmers Association of Nigeria (WFAN) told BusinessDay in a previous interview, that the body has not received any intervention from the current Government of Nigeria. According to him, the last time they got support was during the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) programme under Goodluck Jonathan, when seeds were distributed to farmers.

“Since it stopped, nothing like intervention came to wheat farming,” Muhammad said.
In an earlier BusinessDay publication, checks on wheat budget between 2016 and 2018 show that while there has been growth in budgetary allocation for wheat every year, ironically, there has been a decline in wheat production. This has suggested possible corrupt management of N8.85 billion Federal Government-approved budget for wheat by the Ministry of Agriculture is stunting the development of the crop, leading to rising import bills.

The main driver of Nigeria’s agricultural goods import in the first quarter of 2018 was wheat, just as recorded in the other quarters of the year. Wheat imports from countries including the United States, Canada, Russia, Latvia, and Czech Republic amounted to a total of N72.8 billion.
In the second quarter of 2018, total wheat import was N85.46 billion. For the third quarter of 2018, wheat import was N101.4 billion. In the fourth (and last) quarter of the year, wheat import further increased to N102.7 billion. A cumulative sum of N362 billion was spent importing wheat throughout 2018, at least according to official data from the NBS.

As Balogun suggested, there is a need to develop more homegrown alternative crops that can substitute either completely or in part for wheat. “Something the now failing cassava policy was meant to achieve,” he said.

CALEB OJEWALE