The prices of food items have crashed across the country, says the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari.

The Minister made the disclosure when he featured on an ARISE TV programme on Friday.

He said President Bola Tinubu’s interventions on food security have started yielding results.

He also defended the administration’s strategy of combining production support with temporary importation to address what he described as deep-rooted structural imbalances in the agricultural sector.

“There are tools if you want to take care of the structural imbalances in the agricultural sector,” Kyari said.

“I have said it before—even the former President of the African Development Bank during his tenure, he also imported. There are tools to manage what you already have.

“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came at a time when there was huge structural default in terms of food security and that is why he had to declare the clarion call and emergency on food security in July 2023.

“Food availability, food security is a matter of entrepreneurial availability, supply and demand. In Nigeria so much availability and demand were not there, and part of the reason for the intervention was to ramp up production and at the same time import to make up the difference, because we do not have absolute production for all food crops that we have. Rice, for example—we have about 15% gap in what we can supply and what we have in the country.”

Kyari clarified that the temporary importation window introduced by the government was meant to stabilise prices without discouraging local farmers.

“The importation window was only for six months, and it has come and gone. And that was the amount that was demanded. When you look at the global demand field, it is not enough to make farmers discouraged with agricultural production,” he said.

“For example, while that was going on, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ordered the Central Bank to release 2 million bags of fertilizer to the Federal Ministry of Agriculture for onward delivery free of charge at zero cost, and that was done. So at the end of the day, when you look at it, there were so many interventions. We had so many programmes that supported farmers with fertilizer at 50%. So, there was a lot of production in 2024.”

Tinubu had recently directed a Federal Executive Council (FEC) committee to implement urgent measures aimed at reducing food prices nationwide. (Daily Trust)