A very serious economic crisis is brewing and the government must do everything within its powers to hold back conspiring culprits that are holding the nation hostage, Bismarck Rewane has warned.
Rewane, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Financial Derivatives Company (FDC) Limited said, the culprits include: flooding, exchange rate pass through effect (which is at about N743/$ at the parallel market), money supply saturation (currently at N49.3 trillion) and high logistics costs, such as diesel.
“The recent flooding in Nigeria’s top 13 food-producing states pushes food inflation higher as supply shortages ensue despite the harvest season. The general increase in commodity prices climbed, albeit slowly, to 20.77 per cent in September”, said Rewane in FDC’s latest Bi-Monthly publication.
Based on these, Rewane is advocating a training programs for local farmers. “Intervention programs should be established with the purpose of educating farmers on variety seedlings and irrigation techniques to boost productivity”, he said.
He said, Egypt consumes 21 million tonnes of wheat per year, and about 15 million tonnes are imported from Kyiv and Moscow. In a bid to curb wheat import dependency, the Egyptian government has begun supplying farmers with genetically modified soybeans and maize at subsidized rates to boost production.
The goal of this initiative is to increase cultivated area by two million hectares in the next three years. So far, Egypt has succeeded in planting an additional 250,00 hectares. Production average per hectare has already increased from 2,700 to 3,000 kilograms, and crop wastage has been reduced by 15 per cent using silos.
