Some rice traders in Lagos have lamented the inability of local rice farmers to meet the growing demand for the produce.

The traders spoke in separate interviews on Wednesday in Lagos.

The federal government recently reaffirmed its commitment to increasing local wheat, rice, maize, sorghum and soybean production by providing relevant farm inputs.

John Nwabueze, a foodstuff trader at Alimosho, lamented the growing cost of the produce and the inability of locally grown rice to meet rising demands.

He, however, noted that the quality of locally grown rice had improved and could stand at par with foreign rice.

“If the closure of the border is completely enforced, Nigerians will have no choice but to stick to locally grown rice. When there is a scarcity of smuggled rice, then we will wholly embrace our homegrown rice.

“Local rice farmers may not initially be able to meet the growing demands of rice if the borders are watertight shut, but gradually they will meet up,” stated Mr Nwabueze.

He added that most Nigerians patronised foreign rice because of the poor awareness of the benefits of local rice.

“We have very good local rice brands without stones and well-polished, but Nigerians are used to foreign rice. When we started eating Nigerian rice when the border was initially closed, we had a lot of poorly processed rice in the market.

“But now the situation has changed; however, most customers insist that they would rather buy expensive rice than buy local rice. We want the government to either completely enforce the closure of the borders and put an end to smuggled rice or officially open the borders for legal rice imports,” Mr Nwabueze explained.

Temitayo Abdulhakeem, another rice trader, said though Nigerian rice was picking up in quality, it was insufficient to meet growing local demands.

Mr Abdulhakeem said, “If the borders are completely shut and there is no infiltration of rice into the country, local farmers may not be able to meet the demands. If we cannot even get smuggled rice, it will be more difficult for Nigerians.

“When the borders were initially shut down, and we had no access to foreign rice, we witnessed a daily rise in the price of rice. How many Nigerian rice brands do we have? We have only five brands that are of good quality.”

He added, “We actually seek the opening of the borders for legal importation of rice, but that does not mean the price will drop drastically. It is just that we will have more people importing, and the monopoly of the few importers will be broken.”

He noted that the traders had been unable to access foreign rice recently.

A bag of short-grain rice costs N54,000, while a long-grain rice bag costs N65,000 or N66,000. Nigerian rice sells for between N49,000 and N50,000 per bag.

(NAN)