Why scarcity of maize will persist – Expert

The National Chairman of the National Association of Grains Storage Practitioners of Nigeria, Chief Eric Ozongwu on Wednesday said the scarcity of maize in the market will persist if the right policies are not put in place by the government to provide the necessary farm inputs to farmers.

Chief Ozongwu also said that the poor state of the country’s storage facilities have forced farmers in the north to sell off their grains to countries in the West and Central Africa.

Speaking with Nigerian Tribune through a telephone interview, Chief Ozongwu said “the problem we have with maize comes from the fact that the demand is higher than the supply.

“Nigeria is the major producer of maize in Africa and our savannah is where we have most of the maize; in the South-east and South-south we grow maize, but we consume it.

“Another thing that is affecting the production of maize this year is the policy of the previous government that gives fertiliser directly to farmers; but because this administration is new, they thought they will follow suit, but unfortunately, it has not started.”

He further explained that “the major problem farmers have in the north is fertiliser. If you give a farmer two or three bags of fertilizers, be rest assured they will deliver; unlike sorghum and millet, you can farm them without fertiliser. But as far as maize is concerned, even if you till the whole land and plant it, it will not yield well without fertiliser.

“So farmers didn’t get enough fertiliser and coupled with the fact that the cost of fertilizers increased drastically. The fertiliser that was sold for N5000 two years ago, is now sold for N9000 and there are a lot of peasant farmers that cannot afford it.”

Speaking further Ozongwu said the activities of insurgents in the northeast also affected the production of maize in the Nigeria, as most of the farmers have abandoned their farms for IDPs camp.

“Another reason why maize is scarce is that the little we get from the north east, in the last 3 years, most of them have not gone to the farm because of Boko Haram, so there is a lot of dislocation, some of them are not in their homes, some are in the IDPs camps and they have not been producing”

“Another major problem that we have is that people in the North and Central Africa, because of shortage of rain, they didn’t do well in maize production, so they produced more of sorghum, and they need maize, so they come down to Nigeria for maize.

“Every day, we have about 500 trucks of grains leaving Nigeria and out of that 500 trucks, 300 trucks are loaded with maize,” he said.