“We must eat what we produce,” – Buhari insists, bars CBN from giving money to food importers

President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, December 29, said it has become imperative for Nigerians to go back to agriculture because the oil industry which they abandoned agriculture for is now in turmoil.

Speaking in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, the President said, “CBN must not give money to import food. Already about seven states are producing all the rice we need. We must eat what we produce.

Going back to the land is the way out. We depend on petrol at the expense of agriculture. Now the oil industry is in turmoil. We are being squeezed to produce at 1.5 million barrels a day as against a capacity to produce 2.3 million.

At the same time, the technical cost of our production per barrel is high, compared to the Middle East production.

We are back to the land now. We must not lose the opportunity to make life easier for our people. Imagine what would have happened if we didn’t encourage agriculture and closed the borders. We would have been in trouble.”