'Nigeria’s rice policy hurting Thai production'

Chief Audu Ogbeh, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, has said the ban on the importation of rice into the country was having severe effects on rice production in Thailand.

Thailand used to be the largest exporter of the food staple to Nigeria, until government imposed a moratorium on the importation of rice at the inception of the current administration.



Ogbeh, who revealed this yesterday at the 10th mid-term town hall meeting held in Abuja, stated that increased production of rice in Nigeria has led to the closure of seven factories in Thailand.

The affected mills are considered to be among the biggest producing rice in the South-east Asian country, he said.

Ogbeh said as of 2014, Nigeria was importing 580,000 tonnes of rice from both Thailand and India but the volume dropped drastically by almost 50 per cent to 280,000 tonnes in 2016, thus allowing government to save foreign exchange that would have otherwise gone into importing the commodity.

“We have no reason to be importing everything. The Thai rice is of low-grade because it is stored in silos for many years before it is exported. The Thais don’t eat parboiled rice; they eat white rice,” Ogbeh said.

He lauded the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in Kebbi State involving 400,000 farmers, asking all Nigerians to emulate the state by growing and eating locally grown rice.


Ogbeh, who also unfolded government’s desire to plant 10 million cocoa trees annually in 28 states, added that the Nigerian authorities were on the alert following report of an attempt to import eight shiploads of low quality rice to Benin Republic for onward smuggling into Nigeria.

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