The Federal Government says the country is losing over $5 billion annually due to the increasing activities of smugglers. The Minister of Agriculture, Chief Audu Ogbeh made the disclosure on Wednesday while addressing State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council meeting held at the Presidential Villa.
He said if measures are not intensified toward addressing the challenge, the development would continue to hinder the growth and development of the country.
According to him “That was why the president had to say yesterday (during the 2018 budget presentation at National Assembly) that we will come down hard on activities of smugglers because they are doing us a lot of damage. In fact, the World Bank says that they are costing us $5 billion worth of loss per annum. We keep fighting, little here, a little there. We’ll get there.”
The Minister lamented that while the government was working assiduously to attain self-sufficiency in rice production, rice are being smuggled into the country from Republic of Benin.
“I can give you some figures. Between September 2015 and now, rice importation through the ports dropped from 644,131 tons to 20,000 tons in September this year, which means that by the end of this year to the early part of next year we can literally say we are closed to total self-sufficiency in rice. On the other hand, in Republic of Benin, rice importation has increased to 1.33 million tons because they don’t eat parboiled rice, they eat white rice."
“So every grain of rice landing there is heading for Nigeria through smuggling and some of it also comes in through Niger Republic. These are issues to deal with because we want local rice production to meet our needs and we are creating jobs," he added
