DAILY TRUST
Five months after the federal government announced a 150-day window for free importation of food items, the policy is yet to be implemented, Daily Trust learnt.
The government had on July 8, 2024, announced the duty-free import window for food commodities so as to ensure a reduction in food inflation in the country.
The window ought to have elapsed on December 31, 2024.
The food commodities for which the duty waiver was meant include maize, husked brown rice, wheat and cowpeas.
Since that announcement, neither the government nor the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has provided details on the implementation mechanism.
In the third quarter of 2024, the Customs said the government might forgo N188.37 billion in revenue over the next six months due to the duty waiver granted on the importation of staple foods.
The Comptroller-General of the NCS, Adewale Adeniyi, at that time said the country spent N3.82 trillion on importation of wheat, beans, rice and maize between 2020 and 2023.
The Customs had also on August 14, 2024 said in order to participate in the import wavier, a company must be incorporated in Nigeria and have been operational for at least five years.
It said the Ministry of Finance would periodically provide the NCS with a list of importers and their approved quotas to facilitate the importation of these basic food items within the framework of this policy.
The implementation of the policy is suffering a delay amidst the rising inflation on imported food items in the country.
The rise has been attributed to multiple factors, including the currency devaluation and the global supply chain disruptions.
Daily Trust reports that the average price of imported high-quality rice has surged by 144.77 per cent year-on-year.
The recent report on the Consumer Price Index by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that Nigeria’s imported food inflation surged to 42.29 per cent in November 2024, a significant rise from 23.74 per cent recorded in November 2023, representing a 55 percentage point year-on-year increase.
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