The Reality of Rice Revolution in Nigeria And Why We Must CheerInspection of Rice PlantationThe African ExaminerFour decades of Nigeria’s food balance sheet history were filled with rhetorics, regrets and rots arising from a decline in local food production profile while the food import bill was on the rise. To the discerning, an annual expenditure of $11 billion on food importation is alarming enough, with rice importation alone constituting about N365 billion ($2.4 billion or one-fifth of total annual food import bill) annually, meaning that nearly N1 billion has been spent daily for rice importation for so many years. This paved the way for the rice transformation agenda, an intervention that led – within the past two years – to a massive reduction in Nigeria’s dependence on rice importation. Nigeria has established relations with the Chinese institutions to access this new rice technology as part of our national drive for domestic rice self-sufficiency. Working with state indigenes, Dominion Rice Farm is embarking on what promises to bridge about 15 per cent of imported rice through a local production.