This is an interesting read... As for the graph, Nigeria has now opened its borders. The unceremonious termination of that process begs the question of why the FG started it in the first place. Meanwhile, nothing was achieved by it!
As for the migration crisis, I believe nothing will change until people have a reason to believe once again in the country. In 1999, we saw a lot of reverse migration because of the re-advent of democracy. 23 years after, democracy hasn't delivered its promises.
Only an inspirational leadership with an aspirational vision and a compelling articulation can do a re-1999.
There is some rice at home, but it was likely smuggled in. What we aren’t paying attention to is what else these smugglers bring in, raise capital to buy and how that affects our security. We are burning the house down in every imaginable way because of a wild dream of rice sufficiency. That’s truly insane
I feel like the wave is very politically motivated. There was a wave of Europe by road? Remember that people no longer find that attractive because they could stay back and achieve things.
These days, people would rather take similar risks to leave the shores of the country but it isn’t cheap which leaves me to say that, the costs don’t matter anymore. For a lot of people, it has to be done, for some of us with political aspirations, we hope to fulfil this before Nigeria ends us
I'm surprised at myself for being surprised at the gap between the amount of rice we demand and the amount of rice produced. Something definitely has to be done to make production and local supply more seamless. I'll love to know what you think can be done.
I don't think we can ever meet demand for rice through local production, even if we eliminate all the current bottlenecks such as insecurity, lack of mechanization, poor quality inputs, etc - and it is not the worst thing in the world. There is nothing wrong if we have to import rice to plug the gap in supply. After all, it is literally why trade exists - for you to sell what you have in excess of and buy what you need but are in short supply of. So what do we have in excess of in terms of agriculture? A certain crop called cassava of which Nigeria has over 70% of the world's supply and can be processed into numerous products including food, flour, animal feed, alcohol, starches for sizing paper and textiles, sweeteners, prepared foods, biofuels and bio-degradable products. But yet, we have less than 1% of the global trade in these products. Imagine we up our game in processing cassava even before we even increase production - that is more than enough jobs and forex generated to pay for rice to be imported and still have left over. The priority should be getting cheap food - food security - rather than chasing this myth of food self-sufficiency.
We are consuming more rice but domestic production isn't keeping up with the rising demand. Makes the border closure policy look a lot more ridiculous. One would have thought the FG would be a lot more concerned with fixing the bottlenecks in the production pipeline like the nonexistent storage and transport infrastructure before considering shutting the borders.
To call the border closure policy ridiculous is the height of kindness to be very honest. But you're right anyway, the FG is focusing on all the wrong problems
a quick look at this graph shows that there's a large market for agric produce in Nigeria but a friend in agric investment assures me that this gap is because getting into the sector and making returns is no childs play
This is an interesting read... As for the graph, Nigeria has now opened its borders. The unceremonious termination of that process begs the question of why the FG started it in the first place. Meanwhile, nothing was achieved by it!
As for the migration crisis, I believe nothing will change until people have a reason to believe once again in the country. In 1999, we saw a lot of reverse migration because of the re-advent of democracy. 23 years after, democracy hasn't delivered its promises.
Only an inspirational leadership with an aspirational vision and a compelling articulation can do a re-1999.
There is some rice at home, but it was likely smuggled in. What we aren’t paying attention to is what else these smugglers bring in, raise capital to buy and how that affects our security. We are burning the house down in every imaginable way because of a wild dream of rice sufficiency. That’s truly insane
We're so weird with our stupid policies that I've given up
This is a very interesting read.
I feel like the wave is very politically motivated. There was a wave of Europe by road? Remember that people no longer find that attractive because they could stay back and achieve things.
These days, people would rather take similar risks to leave the shores of the country but it isn’t cheap which leaves me to say that, the costs don’t matter anymore. For a lot of people, it has to be done, for some of us with political aspirations, we hope to fulfil this before Nigeria ends us
I'm surprised at myself for being surprised at the gap between the amount of rice we demand and the amount of rice produced. Something definitely has to be done to make production and local supply more seamless. I'll love to know what you think can be done.
I don't think we can ever meet demand for rice through local production, even if we eliminate all the current bottlenecks such as insecurity, lack of mechanization, poor quality inputs, etc - and it is not the worst thing in the world. There is nothing wrong if we have to import rice to plug the gap in supply. After all, it is literally why trade exists - for you to sell what you have in excess of and buy what you need but are in short supply of. So what do we have in excess of in terms of agriculture? A certain crop called cassava of which Nigeria has over 70% of the world's supply and can be processed into numerous products including food, flour, animal feed, alcohol, starches for sizing paper and textiles, sweeteners, prepared foods, biofuels and bio-degradable products. But yet, we have less than 1% of the global trade in these products. Imagine we up our game in processing cassava even before we even increase production - that is more than enough jobs and forex generated to pay for rice to be imported and still have left over. The priority should be getting cheap food - food security - rather than chasing this myth of food self-sufficiency.
We are consuming more rice but domestic production isn't keeping up with the rising demand. Makes the border closure policy look a lot more ridiculous. One would have thought the FG would be a lot more concerned with fixing the bottlenecks in the production pipeline like the nonexistent storage and transport infrastructure before considering shutting the borders.
To call the border closure policy ridiculous is the height of kindness to be very honest. But you're right anyway, the FG is focusing on all the wrong problems
a quick look at this graph shows that there's a large market for agric produce in Nigeria but a friend in agric investment assures me that this gap is because getting into the sector and making returns is no childs play
Supply chain issues, poor internal secruity. The list of reasons why it's difficult to scale production are endless