Lagos Rice Mill Starts Production November – Fashola
Imota Rice Mill is expected to start churning out rice by November, the Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Agriculture, Oluwarotimi Fashola, has said.
The Imota rice mill is an agricultural plant in Ikorodu, a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. It was built in 2021 and has been projected to commence full production in the fourth quarter of of 2022.
The inauguration of the 32-metric tons per hour rice mill, located in Ikorodu, had reportedly been postponed more than three times.
But the SA to the governor at a breakfast meeting on ‘Investing in the Lagos Food Value Chain’, said the state government was ready to commence production on the mill.
“What we have tried to do is to go by the value chain. We know that we don’t have the land for production, so processing and value addition is our hallmark,” he said.
Fashola disclosed that the Lagos state government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with SWAGCO, a southwest agriculture company and an arm of Odu’a Group.
According to him, the company has had a pilot production of a 100 hectares of rice plantation in the state, and will lead the role for the pilot production this year.
The Imota rice mill is to supply over 2.4 million bags of rice, the SA said. “Lagos actually eat between a million and a million tonnes of rice. So the rice mill is just 25 per cent of the needs of Lagos.
“There is still a lot more that is needed because Lagos is an urban centre. It is the highest rice consuming state in the whole nation.”
Fashola explained that with an average of 40 kilograms per person eating every year coupled with the growing population of 20 people that come to Lagos every day, the state currently estimated at 22 million people, has a lot to be done when it comes to food.
“Food security is a business for everyone,” he added.
The federal government of Nigeria had banned rice imports across its land borders to encourage local production and had also through the central bank stopped rice importers’ access to foreign exchange in the official window.
Rice processing involves milling stages to produce edible rice as the final product. But as crude rice goes through the milling process, by-products are generated such as rice brown that have shown to exhibit beneficial impact on human and animal nutrition, husk, and broken rice of various sizes.
According to the Lagos state government, the Imota rice mill will, without doubt, generate a lot of by-products that can be used for several other useful products, thereby leading to the settling up of many complementary businesses, in the rice processing value chain, such as livestock feed mill, rice flour factories, rice bran oil, haulage and transportation services, among others.
The breakfast meeting, organized by the Office of Sustainable Development Goals and Investment, had the representative of the Nigerian-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NBCCI) in attendance, among other Chambers, organized private sector, corporate organizations, and other entities in the agriculture sector business and value-chain.
Comments are closed.