The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Chief
Audu Ogbeh, stated in Abuja on Wednesday that the eating of rice in the
nation was rising and that many individuals didn't know that the rice had some
level of arsenic.
The minister further stressed that eating rice in
substantial amount all the time poses some kind of risk to heathy living,
including that substituting it with potato would be a good option.
“The volume of importation of virtually everything into this
country is too much.
“The demand for dollars in this country as at today is 2.5
billion a week; this is the quantum of dollars Nigerians are asking for to
import things.
“Since 1986, we began this habit of importing everything and
doing virtually nothing at home to sustain ourselves; now, we do not have the
dollars and people are very hungry.
“This day was coming anyway, no matter who was in power; we
have the most ridiculous method of devaluing our currency; every week, we
auction the dollar and naira goes up.
“We sat and were hoping that by devaluation, we are going to
arrive at Eldorado; if we continue like this, it will be a thousand naira to a
dollar,’’ Audu said.
While lauding the financial specialist, Ogbeh said that any
private sector investor’s exertion that would create local generation of goods
and services would be completely upheld by his ministry.
“We should aggressively take the West African market; there
is no reason why we should allow Irish potato from Ireland and France and
Belgium into West Africa; it is the same story with onions.
Earlier on, the Chief Executive Officer of VICAMPRO, Mr
Michael Agbogo, said that potato could bring esteem worth more than one
trillion naira yearly if appropriately embark upon.
He emphasised that potato was the fourth most essential
harvest on the planet and that a barrel of oil was a likeness 14 kilograms of
potatoes.
Agbogo took time to explain that, while current cost of
unrefined petroleum will bring the nation about N16,000 per barrel, the
comparable in potato will get the nation N39,000.
In terms of value, he said potato had three times the
estimation of unrefined petroleum, including that it was an enormous industry
the nation could get into.
Agbogo cited Egypt and Algeria as the main potato producing
nations in Africa, with Egypt delivering four million tons every year from
around 100,000 hectares of land.
He said that Nigeria, which had almost 500,000 hectares, was
attempting to create one million tons of potato per year.
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