President Buhari has reiterated his administration’s plan to stop the importation
of food items that Nigerian farmers can produce locally. He said this on Tuesday in
Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State capital, where he went to inaugurate the 2015/16
Anchor Borrowers’ Dry Season Rice Planting programme sponsored by the Central
Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
While addressing the farmers, Buhari stated that the role agriculture played in the
economy of the country before the discovery of oil cannot be overemphasised. He
said agriculture was then the mainstay of the country’s economy.
The president said: “The importance of agriculture in the economy cannot be
overemphasised. Prior to the advent of oil, our country survived on agricultural
production with huge economic potentials from our palm oil, groundnuts, cotton,
and rubber plantations.
“During this period, the economies of our sub-region were built on agricultural
activities and our gross domestic product grew steadily. The discovery of oil was
expected to complement our agricultural productivity, but we allowed oil to
almost completely replace it,” he added.
The President stated that the current trend in the international oil market has
brought to the fore the urgent need to diversify both the productive and revenue
bases of our economy and conserve our foreign reserve by limiting our appetite
for importation of goods that we can easily produce locally.
He said: “This means there are limited resources available to government at all
levels and hence economic diversification is no longer an option for us as a nation;
it is the only way to reclaim economic momentum and the drive to prosperity.
One way to do this is to go back to land and develop our agricultural production.’’
