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Frozen Green Asparagus Many Nigerians have expressed fear that unless urgent measures, with far-reaching impacts are taken, the present food shortages and the attendant prices would soon assume an uncontrollable situation. However, Dr. Eleoke C. Chukwuigwe, former Head of the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Nkporlu, Port Harcourt said Nigerians do not need to panic but rather to strategise on possible ways towards averting the situation. “We are not in food crisis here in Nigeria yet. If you look at what happened in Haiti and Egypt where people or citizens took to the street because of lack of food, that is food crisis. Nigerian present food situation has not graduated to what you can term crisis situation,” but is a wake-up call on Nigerians particularly the authorities to strategise and tap fully abundant agric potentials in the country. Chukwuigwe, an associate professor and former Director, Nigrian Agricultural Land Development Authority (NALDA) said Nigeria has not got to food crisis situation because part of oil money is being invested in importing food from outside the country but warned that if the current scarcity persists, we might get there. “If our oil has not been around, the country could have been at that crisis situation. So thanks to the oil,” he said. Apart from allaying the fear about food crisis at present, Chukwuigwe outlined certain measures which the nation should put in place to avert the eminent crisis in agriculture. He said Nigerians should adopt the economic principle of comparative advantage by reducing demand and consumption of rice by eating more of cassava products which is relatively cheaper and more available than rice. “Must we eat rice? In my days, when we were growing up, we only eat rice on Sundays. All we need do is eat more of the varieties of cassava products,” he advised. The university don said the country has a lot of potentials to produce rice to meet our domestic needs and event to export to boost our exchange rate. “We have suitable and fertile land from Uzoakoli, Afikpo to Ogoja that cultivation of rice can thrive very well but little attention is being paid to this opportunity. We used to have Ogoja rice, Abakaliki rice,Afikpo rice etc,” he said. He noted that apart from the problem of stones in our specie of rice, the local rice is richer and tastier than the foreign rice which we import from other rice producing nations of the world. On how to attend to the problem of stones in our specie of rice, Chukwuigwe disclosed that there are machines that can destone our rice and make them free for stones. “Our rice has some richness and is better in taste compared to foreign rice except we have more stones in it which can be destoned because there are destoning machines,” he said. Commenting on the swift measure adopted by the Federal Government by importing N80 billion rice, the associate professor commended the measure but added that apart from importing which he regarded to be a short term measure, the Federal Government should consider investing huge sum on local production of rice. He remarked that importation depresses local price level and kills incentives for local production since by importing bulk goods, the prices become cheaper than the locally produced ones. This he said has the implication of chasing local producers out of business as they cannot sell below their production cost. He called on the government to encourage local productions of agro-allied products and consider diversification so as to increase the choice opportunities. One way of achieving this according to him is to introduce aspect of mechanisation in our agriculture that reduces drudgery. The don revealed that a recent study on potentials and constraints of oil palm in Rivers State and Bayelsa showed that young men were not willing to go into oil palm production while the few old men willing to venture cannot meet the local needs. He attributed this unwillingness of the able-bodied young men to the unattractiveness of the farming system. “Not many of us are willing to climb the palm trees but with aspect of mechanisation that can make it easy for a farmer to harvest hectares of palm trees while on ground, it reduces drudgery, makes the system attractive and increases production,” he stated.