Did you know that Imo State was once known for rice production, churning out over 10,000 tonnes a year? When the Nigerian economy thrived on agriculture, the state was one of the major contributors to the national GDP, ranking among the highest producers of rice.
In Okigwe zone were majority of the rice farms were located, over 10000 tonnes of rice was produced annually. The economy of the rural communities was buoyant and the youths were gainfully engaged. The state was then exporting rice to other parts of the Southeast and the rest of the country.
This prompted the World Bank in conjunction with the Federal Government in 1977 to cite the multi-billion naira irrigation project in Egweleze Umukara in Ihitte Uboma Council Area to aid commercial rice farming in the state.
The project with an expansive rice farm measuring 66 hectares and 6,500 meters wide dam was constructed by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) and managed by the state Agricultural Development Programme (ADP), which engaged a workforce of over 5000.
Apart from the rice farm and irrigation project, the state government and other private investors consequently built rice milling factories across the district as part of the value chain.
The economy of the state, especially the immediate communities was buoyant. The enterprise created wealth and employment. That was then when agriculture was the mainstay of the nation’s economy.
An irrigation expert and field engineer in the defunct rice farm, Mr. Keke Ikechukwu, described it as a food basket of the state, which he said provided the food security for the state. But shortly after Nigeria jettisoned agriculture for oil, this critical investment was abandoned and soon died out altogether. The once important dam has turned to a major threat to the agrarian communities after the water broke the barrier and flooded not only what used to be a flourishing rice farm but other surrounding farmlands.
Today all the farm equipment, as well as administrative and other office buildings, are dilapidated. The connecting farm roads have all been washed away and overgrown by forest.
This is the sorry state of the World Bank Rice project that was once a major employer of labour in the state. Most painful is the fact that neither the World Bank with a controlling share of 60% and the state government has taken any step to salvage the situation.
For more than 20 years it laid comatose, while the weary staff dispersed after appealing to successive governments to revive the farm without success.
Fortunately, the abandoned project has gotten the attention of the Senator representing Okigwe Senatorial zone, Senator Benjamin Uwajumogu, who has begun an agricultural revolution to revive dead and dying agribusinesses in the zone as part of his constituency projects.
The Senator during a fact finding tour of the project, lamented that such huge project with the potential of creating wealth for the entire nation was abandoned to decay.
The Senator, who blamed government’s indifference to agriculture for the collapse of the project and other similar agro-allied companies across the country, said that the rice farm has the capacity to meet Nigeria’s annual rice demand, which he put at 6.5 million tons a year.
He said, “At a time when countries like Thailand, which is among the world’s highest exporters of rice, were setting committees to control rice production, Nigeria under Muhammadu Buhari’s regime set up a Committee headed by Umaru Dikko to supervise rice importation instead. This is how we got to where we are today”.
Speaking further, he said, “Today Nigeria consumes 6.5 million tonnes of rice annually, while the production rate is at 1.5 million ton annually leaving behind a huge deficit. But if projects like this are up and running, it will help to return Nigeria back to the map of global rice producers”.
The Senator, who was conducted round the abandoned rice farm by the former field Engineer, explained that, “with the global economic situation, agriculture is the way to go. Today the Federal Government spends huge sums of money to finance agricultural ventures in the North but if a quarter of that sum is spent in the Southeast, we will soon be exporting food to the North”.
He stressed further that, “we are going to attract private investors to partner in this project because as you can see, it will take about N1 billion to get this project back to track. We need the support of the Federal Government and the Ministry of Agriculture to revive this all important venture.
“In this part of the country, we have arable land that has not been cultivated all we need is for the government to provide equipment. For instance we have only three dams in the Southeast. But I am using this opportunity to show that we can surpass even the North in agriculture. Today, Anambra and Ebonyi states have quadrupled its rice production and we hope to even beat that record in Imo.
“I am appealing to the FG to see the need to help these communities to realize their agricultural potentials. We have fertile lands, all we need is to open up these lands and provide palliatives and other incentives for the people to return fully to agriculture. We must feed ourselves and our nation”.
Some of the villagers who expressed fear over the rising threat by the dam appealed to the government to quickly repair it to avert impending disaster.
“If the irrigation project is revived, apart from working in the company, we will also go back to rice production fully and we can cultivate all year round,” they said.
