Page 43 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 16

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Rice cartels undermine local production efforts in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire

The Nigerian government imposed an 110% tariff on rice imports in 2013 to encourage domestic production.
But it offered trading companies quotas with much lower tariffs if they could show that they were investing in
local rice production. The result: investigations by the Nigerian Senate revealed that the largest trading com-
panies either lied about their investments or exceeded allocated quotas, adding up to a loss of over US$160
million to the Nigerian government in 2014, the year the scheme was implemented.[1] When the government
then abolished the trade differentials and implemented foreign exchange controls to further block imports,
traders rerouted their shipments to the port of Cotonou, in Benin, and the rice was smuggled into Nigeria
over land.

Those traders who are investing into Nigerian rice production have directed much of their investment to their
own massive rice plantations. This is the case of the Singapore-based multinational food company Olam,
which is building Africa’s largest rice plantation on a 10,000 ha land concession in Nasarawa State.[3] Olam is
one of the companies that violated the Nigerian government’s tariff reduction scheme by greatly exceeding its
allocated quota, depriving the state of around US$25 million.

Olam had also pledged to make multi-million dollar investments in Côte d’Ivoire’s rice sector in the wake of
the rice price crisis of 2007-8, alongside several other big rice traders.[4] Olam’s promised investment never
materialised, nor did the deals to establish mills, large-scale rice farms and contract growing operations signed
between the government and five other multinational cereal trading companies as part of the country’s Coop-
eration Framework with the G8’s New Alliance.[5] All of these projects failed, including a high-profile 100,000
ha project with one of the world’s largest grain traders, Louis Dreyfus of France.[6] Meanwhile, rice imports
into Côte d’Ivoire have continued to grow, hitting a record high in 2018 and accounting for over half of the
country’s rice supply-- and Louis Dreyfus continues to dominate the import market.

The hoax of climate smart agriculture

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has become one of the new slogans of governments, institutions and cor-
porations when they talk about where farming should be heading in the era of climate crisis. The World Bank,
FAO, CGIAR and other institutions all have set up special departments to deal with the issue, and websites to
inform the public. These agencies, together with governments, NGOs and the private sector, formed the Glob-
al Alliance for CSA in 2015. Centrally involved in the launch of the Alliance was the fertiliser industry, which
was trying to hijack the growing enthusiasm for agroecology. Of the Alliance’s 29 non-governmental founding
members, there were three fertiliser industry lobby groups, two of the world’s largest fertiliser companies (Yara
of Norway and Mosaic of the US), and a handful of organisations working directly with fertiliser companies on
climate change programmes.[1] Initially a full 60% of the private sector members of the Alliance were from the
fertiliser industry, and today they are still centrally involved in its management and priority setting.[2]

But everybody seems to have their own understanding of what CSA entails. The UN and the World Bank
present CSA as achieving a “triple-win” of outcomes: increased productivity, enhanced resilience, and reduced
emissions from farming. Underlying all this is the notion of ‘sustainable intensification’ that is promoted by
fertiliser companies like Yara or pesticide and seed companies like Syngenta and Bayer/Monsanto.

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