PBA ReporterChairman of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has alerted that Nigeria may face food scarcity by June due to the Russia-Ukraine war as a good percentage of foodstuffs and fertilizers come from the region.
The African richest man stated this recently at the 4th Annual Nigerian Food Processing Nutrition Leadership Forum held in Lagos.
He said: “The issue is that there will be a shortage of wheat and a lot of products because as we speak a lot of fertilizers are imported from these countries. Russia and Ukraine do almost 13 per cent of the world’s urea and 26 per cent of the world’s potash and then phosphate fertilizers.”
According to the billionaire: “There will be a scarcity of food because generally, people will not be able to access fertilizers going forward. We will not see the effect now but in the next two or three months, even the US will not be able to grow the same number of plants they did last year because of this.”
Calling for an immediate ban on maize exportation as a first step to nip the imminent famine, Dangote said:
“…we need to sit down and have a discussion about this. Because right now you’ll start seeing people exporting maize which I think we need to stop so we don’t create shortages domestically and we really need to make sure that we grow more so that we don’t have a shortage of food.”
Similarly, the CEO of Flour Mills of Nigeria, Mr. Boye Olusanya also called for urgent action to stop the impending food crisis, noting that Russia and Ukraine are numbers one and five respectively in wheat exportation in the world.
Wow! This is a warning we should heed to