The Director General, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Muda Yusuf, has called on the Federal Government to improve crop production processing in the country.
This came after the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, announced that 72 metric tonnes of yam were ready for export to the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
The LCCI boss expected the government to look more into improving the production of yam and other cash crops to boost local consumption before thinking of export.
He said, “There is the need to get our priorities right. The major preoccupation of the agriculture ministry at this time should be how to improve productivity in agriculture. The sector is still dominated by smallholder farmers, who do not have the capacity to support the realisation of the vision of food security for the country.”
He added that the agricultural sector had been battling with a lot of issues, ranging from obsolete or crude method of farming over the years to unavailability of funds by many farmers, which had led to low productivity.
“The sector needs an overhaul in the sense that it is grappling with serious issues like high cost of farm inputs, high cost of machineries and equipment, access to land for mechanised farming, access to finance, especially working capital by investors in the sector and security challenges faced by farmers because of the activities of herdsmen among others. These are the issues we expect the ministry to address urgently.”
Yusuf added that the biggest fear of majority of the citizens now is the high cost of food, which has been lingering for some time.
“The negative welfare effect is profound. It is difficult to reconcile this reality with the dramatisation of the export of yam. It is good to generate foreign exchange, but we have a moral responsibility to respond urgently to the problem of hunger occasioned by high cost of food,” he said.
