The Central Bank of Nigeria and Heritage Bank Plc have adopted a more robust approach to boost local production and reduce dependence on importation as part of their commitment to ongoing drive by the Federal Government to achieve food security.
The partnership is basically to consummate Wheat Seed Multiplication Project in Jos, Plateau State, which is an integral component of the apex bank’s wheat value chain intervention to address the challenges in wheat value chain, thereby increasing the domestic production.
The novel initiative will be financed by Heritage Bank through rain-fed cultivation and it is actually the first wheat programme that would be flagged off in wet season.
Speaking, the Deputy Governor, CBN, Edward Adamu, explained that the short-term benefit of the initiative would be addition of about 2, 000 metric tonnes (MT) of high yield seed variety to the national wheat seed stock which is 20, 000MT currently.
According to him, this effort has the potential to add about 750, 000MT of wheat annually through rain-fed cultivation.
The Deputy Governor said that it was estimated that only one per cent or 63,000MT of wheat, out of the five to six million metric tons of wheat consumed annually was produced locally, while with the Brown Revolution and in partnership with Heritage Bank and others, CBN seeks to eliminate dependence on imported wheat by 60%.
The MD/CEO of Heritage Bank, Ifie Sekibo, who expressed concern about Nigeria’s rising wheat importation bills, affirmed that this strategic partnership would help reverse the trends and upscale domestic production of wheat to close the wide supply gap in the agricultural space.
As part of the bank’s efforts to support the high yield seed variety to national wheat seed stock, Sekibo represented by Head of Agribusiness and Export Department of the bank, Ugonwa Ikegwuonu, explained that the bank set out to cultivate a total of 1, 000 hectares of farm land at the end of the year with at least producing about 5tonnes of wheat seeds per hectare in terms of yield.
Sekibo said: “We set out to cultivate a total of 1,000 hectares of farm land but at the end of the day because of time constraints and other challenges, we have been able to cultivate 357 hectares.
“The crops according to the project manager are doing very well & in few weeks they will be ripe for harvest, in fact part of the farm is already ripe for harvest. So we set out with this partnership with two anchors which we call service providers”, he added.
In his welcome address, the Governor of Plateau State, Simon Lalong, projected that Nigeria was on the path to food security with the ‘Brown Revolution’ the rain-fed wheat which has the potential of reducing the yearly $2 billion wheat importation bill.
