Abuja — Against the expectation of many Nigerians, the minister of Agriculture and Water Resources, Dr Sayyadi Abba Ruma has said that the N80 billion approved by the Federal Government is not meant for rice importation alone but an agricultural development fund meant to rejuvenate the entire sector.

In an exclusive interview with LEADERSHIP yesterday in Abuja, the minister further explained that part of the money would be devoted to the general processing of agricultural produce.

"As the short term measure, the N80 billion is an agricultural development fund which will address the issue of importation and part of the money would also be used to stimulating storage, stimulating processing, market infrastructure development for agricultural produce."

The minister, however, disclosed that there are no technology for rice processing and the two we have are private sector processing. "Even the milling machine we have are for small scale and they have power challenges, while some are obsolete and they cannot do work much faster, neither could they give you the requisite quantity. For instance that is now needed to meet marketing.

According to him, government have been making painstaking efforts to come out with robust policy package solution that would rejuvenate Nigeria's agriculture for the next six months to strengthen the national food security initiative programme in the area of production, storage, processing and market infrastructure development.

He added that the current food crisis in the country is as a result of 15 years of neglect of our ability to come out with policies, strategies that would re-engineer the agric sector to produce adequately.

The minister said that Yar'Adua's administration is confronted with this problem of long period neglect but has come out with medium and long term measures to address the perennial problem.

He further said the new drive of the government in the development of agriculture is embedded on what he called value change re-engineering and restructuring strategy, which according to him if vigorously pursued would shot growth rate to between 10 - 15 per cent in the short run.