Chairman of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has raised the alarm that Nigeria may face food scarcity by June
this year due to the Russia-Ukraine war as a good percentage of foodstuffs and fertilizers come from the region The Trumpet gathered.
Dangote stated this recently at the fourth Annual Nigerian Food Processing Nutrition Leadership Forum in Lagos.
He said: “The issue is that there will be 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 almost13 per cent of the world’s urea and 26 per cent of global potash and phosphate fertilizers.
“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 United States will not be able to grow the same number of plants they did last year because of the crisis.”
Dangote, who canvassed immediate ban on maize exportation as a first step to nip the imminent famine in the bud, said: “We need to sit down and discuss this.
Read Also: PHED partners First Independent on stable power supply
Because right now, you’ll start seeing people exporting maize, which I think we need to stop so that 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 Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, Mr. Boye Olusanya, also advocated urgent action to stop the impending food crisis, noting that Russia and Ukraine were numbers one and five in global wheat exportation.
