By Tejiri Ebikeme/Francis Sadhere
The Chairman and Executive Officer of Raymos Guanah Farms Limited, Barrister Raymos Guanah has lamented the Importation of garri, rice, palm oil and other food items into the country, calling for total revival of the agricultural sector.
In an exclusive interview with our Correspondents in Asaba, the state capital, the former Commissioner for Lands in Delta State, said Nigeria is blessed with fertile soil, but regretted that Nigerians have put farming behind them and resorted to the Importation of food into the country.
He said; “We have abandoned our agricultural prospective for oil. Agriculture was our major revenue before oil was discovered. And what we would have done is that we would have used our proceeds from oil to promote agriculture.”
“Today, we import everything into the country. We import tomatoes, pepper, rice, onion and recently, I hear we are importing garri from Ghana,” he said.
According to him, ” To encourage people to patronize local rice, I think the government should start the process by making sure that all government institutions – right from the primary, secondary, tertiary, local government, state government, and federal government – in the country are encouraged to eat local rice. Nigerian rice farmers and processors should be encouraged to produce quality rice for the country. Government should encourage farmers, right from land preparation, planting, harvesting, threshing, winnowing. A lot of persons can be engaged in this long process.
Barrister Guanah added that;” Like rice, we also import sugar into the country. It is unfortunate that just like we have our own local rice production, we do not have our locally processed sugar. But we have all it takes to plant sugarcane and process sugar.”
“It is a shame that right from when I was born till now, we are still importing sugar and there are no indications that we will start processing sugar. But we must start from somewhere,” he stated.
