Mohammed Shosanya
Unless food crisis is addressed,inflation rate would continue to soar in Nigeria,Dr.Tayo Aduloju, Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG),has said.
Aduloju,who stated this at the NESG’s quaerterly media engagement in Abuja,advocated the need for concerted and collaborate commitment among all tiers of government to addressing the food insecurity plaguing the country.
Speaking on the measures to enhance food production in Nigeria,the boss of NESG, said “It must be done differently from.the way we had done it in the past.
“Every state in Nigeria should tell us their farm size and their cultivation rate today. We have had these conversations with some of the Commissioners for Agriculture across the states.
“We will now begin to get a real sense of what our problems are. May be, we should give land for farming to those that can do large scale farming.
“It needs a collaborative effort. The states have to come along. We think in the second half of the year that growth will improve, if some of these things in the pipeline happen.
“Inflationary pressure will likely amplify, if the food situation does not improve because, of course, if you look at the composite component of food inflation in the overall headline, it remains very high”,he said.
He commented on the 150-day duty-free import window for food commodities, suspension of duties, tariffs and taxes on the importation of certain food commodities recently announced by Minister of Agriculture and Food Security,saying it’s a short-term intervention to ensure that people don’t go hungry.
According to him,while it was received with mixed feelings,some people viewed it as an attack on the productivity side.
He added:”The truth is, if you go by the cultivation rate this year, we are not on track to produce enough food for ourselves this year. That’s what the numbers are showing.
“So, it seems as if the intervention is a short-term intervention to ensure that people don’t go hungry. It’s a hunger response. I don’t think it’s a food system. We should not call it a food system response. It’s actually a one-year response.
“But ultimately, it’s not sufficient, we must get this food system back to work. We must build a resilient food system in the country.”
He decried what he described as the absence of well-bundled public sequence reforms by President Bola Tinubu’s administration in the last one year, adding that the development has resulted in high volatility in the economy.
He expressed optimism that there would be economic growth, if some of the measures are implemented by the government in the second half of the year.
On the high cost pharmaceutical products such as drugs, Adeloju lauded Federal Government’s initiative to introduce zero tariffs, excise duties, and VAT on specialised machinery, equipment and pharmaceutical raw materials.
He noted that if nothing was done to reduce the cost of drugs in Nigeria, it would lead to unmanageable health outcomes in the country.
