Nigeria’s year-on-year wheat importation has risen by 54 percent, to N64.7 billion in the first quarter 2017 from N42.1billion in q1 2016, owing to the unavailability of High Quality Cassava Flour (HQCF) composite for flour millers to include with wheat for flour production, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
Since the adoption of the cassava flour initiative by the previous administrations, flour millers across the country had partially substituted wheat flour with cassava composite flour, for production but their inability to get enough HQCF has forced them to import more wheat in recent months, BusinessDay learnt.
“Flour millers are not getting much cassava composite flour presently because of the huge shortage of cassava tubers. You can hardly get HQCF in the market now to buy,” Olalekan Salisu, secretary, Flour Millers Association of Nigeria, told BusinessDay in a telephone response to questions.
“There is heavy demand for cassava tubers now, form people who process it into pellets and other by products for export, leaving little for processors to process into flour for miller to buy,” Salisu said.
He stated that flour millers are currently mixing local wheat with imported wheat varities for producing flour, noting that the association now has a collection point of wheat from local farmers in Kano, one of the major wheat producing states in the country.
Nigeria’s cassava production has dropped by 40 percent in recent months, owing to farmers’ unwillingness to plant cassava, due to last year’s glut and herdsmen destruction of some cassava farmlands.
Nike Tinier, president, Industrial Cassava Stakeholders Association of Nigeria, told BusinessDay that the current price at which millers buy HQCF from them is no longer sustainable for their businesses, as prices of the raw tubers are more expensive now.
“We no longer sell to the flour millers because they want to buy a ton of HQCF for N80,000 as against N160,000 which is profitable for us. We need to continue to be in business,” Tinier said.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in its recent biannual report, Nigeria’s 2017 wheat imports are estimated to increase by 100,000 tons to 4.6 million tons, in spite of the restrictive access to foreign exchange and government renewed commitment to halve the country’s imports by 2018.
The FAO report stated that Nigeria is the third largest wheat importer in the world and that the import demand is expected to stay strong in 2017 as domestic production remains small.
Nigeria produces 400,000 metric tons of wheat per annum and demand is put at 4 million metric tonnes, leaving a supply demand gap of 3.6 million metric tonnes, according to data from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture.
Efforts at boosting local wheat production in recent years have been obstructed by the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-Eastern region of the country, as wheat farmers in Borno, the country’s major producing state, had abandoned their farmlands and fled to other regions for safety, while some took residency at the Internally Displaced Person’s (IDP’s) camps.
“The insurgency in the North-Eastern region is a major setback to our efforts in increasing wheat production. Before the Boko Haram conflicts, Borno alone contributed 30 percent to the country’s total output but now, the state has been contributing nothing,” said Saleh Mohammed, president, Wheat Growers Association of Nigeria.
Another obstruction to government efforts at boosting local production is the high cost of inputs.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Nigeria’s production costs for local wheat have doubled to approximately $420 per ton over the last six months, owing to high input costs. The USDA states that domestic wheat prices are also at $420 per ton in local markets and $600 per ton for regional export market and $500 per ton for institutional purchases.
As a result, wheat farmers are only encouraged to maintain production because of institutional purchases and the lucrative export sales to regional markets in countries within the Sahel region like Niger, Chad, Mali, and Burkina Faso, the USDA 2017 grain report states.
Nigeria is a major market for a specie of wheat known as ‘hard red winter’. There is also a growing demand for soft red winter for biscuits and cookies; hard white wheat for bread and noodles; and durum wheat for pasta, experts say.
Akinwunmi Adesina, president, African Development Bank (AfDB) who was also the former minister of agriculture, speaking at the African Economic Conference in Abuja in December 2016, according to a news wire report, said that flour millers across the country have now all shifted to partial substitution of wheat flour with cassava composite flours.
Josephine Okojie
