Against the background of Federal Government’s diversification agenda, Dangote Group has intensified its interest in agriculture by stepping up its investment.
Disclosing this during a meeting with some Asian businessmen, who visited him at the weekend in Lagos, the President of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, said his belief in the current administration’s approach to reenergising the economy towards an export oriented one made him step up investment in agriculture.
He said Nigeria had wasted so much foreign exchange importing food that ordinarily should be produced locally and even exported, stressing that until a new approach at redirecting the economy from import dependent one, no meaningful changes could happen.
According to him, “we have invested massively in rice, sugar, dairy products and tomatoes. Our rice out-grower scheme will produce rice by next year that would reduce our rice import to nearly zero because Nigeria imports more than half of the rice it consumes. We have expanded our sugar operations with our operations in Tonga in Nasarawa in addition to Numan sugar projects where sugarcane is cultivated for raw sugar production.
“Some months ago, we laid the foundation for the construction of ultramodern rice processing integrated plant that will process 16 metric tons of paddy rice in one hour, by the time you multiply this by the number of hours and days it operates, you will understand that this is huge. The interesting thing about investment in agric is that apart from food production sufficiency, the job potential is unquantifiable.”
He also declared that his company was investing massively in agribusiness, promoting industrialisation through backward integration process to ensure Nigeria becomes self-reliant in food production in good time and save it the much-needed foreign exchange hitherto spent on importation.
He said: “We are producing the raw materials needed in our factories. In the sugar sector, we developed a sugar backward integration project plan targeted at the production of 1.5MT/PA from various sites across Nigeria in the next 10 years. “We have an out-grower scheme; enough paddy rice will be grown and harvested for processing. Some 20,000 out-growers expected to produce an average of 180,000 tons of paddy rice. We are presently building rice processing mills in Kano, Jigawa, Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Niger states in the first phase.”
