General
Rice smuggling on Nigeria, Benin border alarming, says Buhari
President Muhammadu Buhari has said large quantities of rice and other goods are being smuggled into the country through Nigeria’s border with Benin Republic, adding that the frontier was “partially closed” by the security forces to curb the trend.
“The country has saved huge sums of money which would otherwise have been expended on importing rice using our scarce foreign reserves,” Bloomberg quoted Buhari as saying during a meeting in Yokohama, Japan, with Benin President Patrice Talon.
“We cannot allow smuggling of the product at such alarming proportions to continue.”
Though there was no formal announcement of a border closing, travellers have reported restrictions since Aug. 20, with long lines of trucks laden with goods waiting on both sides of the border.
Buhari, who won re-election in February, is seeking to boost agricultural production as a means of diversifying the country’s economy away from its oil dependence, with self-sufficiency in rice production a key target.
As imports by Africa’s most populous country of more than 200 million people plunged 95% in the last four years under government curbs, imports by Benin, which has only 11 million people, jumped to make it the biggest buyer from Thailand, the world’s number two producer, according to the Thai Rice Exporters Association.
Bloomberg
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