Nigeria losing $30bn to imported food items’

THE Fedeeral Government has been advised to invest more in the areas of agricul­tural development and food processing to save Nigeria an estimated $30 billion expend­ed on importation of foreign foods and agro-allied prod­ucts annually.

Foremost industrialist and President/CEO of Erisco Foods Limited, Chief Eric Umeofia, who stated this in an interview with Daily Sun in his Lagos office decried such huge capital flight aris­ing from Nigerians; support for farmers and agro-allied processors in China and India to the detriment of the local economy. He urged the Mu­hammadu Buhari administra­tion to demonstrate the neces­sary courage to ban imports of foods and to encourage the growth and sustenance of indigenous investments in the agricultural and food pro­cessing business. The Erisco Foods boss who attributed the rising cases of renal failures and other terminal diseases among Nigerians to the con­sumption imported foods including tomato paste from Asia, said the easiest way to check such ugly trends would be to ban substandard foods coming into the country.

He regretted that foreign manufacturers have contin­ued to collaborate with Nige­rian agencies to undermine the country’s economic inter­est by dumping products they cannot even consume in their home countries.

Umeofia also called for major reforms in NAFDAC and Customs Service, the two regulatory institutions with responsibility for checking quality of goods entering the country, noting that it was the leakages from these establish­ments that have aided foreign firms engaging in dumping of sub-standard foods in the country.

“We need to diversify the economy more into agricul­ture. We have about $30billion to save annually if we patron­ise made-in-Nigerian foods and made-in-Nigerian agric products,” Umeofia said.

“We are losing so much depending on foreign prod­ucts and that is not the way to develop because some of the foods imported into the country are very harmful to the health of our citizens and our regulatory agencies like NAFDAC and Customs are not doing enough to check what comes in,” he added.

He lamented that many lo­cal food processing firms are finding it hard to sell off their goods owing to the presence of large volumes of cheap and substandard products in Ni­gerian market. He called on the economic team of Presi­dent Muhammadu Buhari to develop a home-grown eco­nomic programme that suits the peculiarities of the coun­try and end the trend of trying to deploy foreign economic theories to solve the country’s problems.

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