The Federal Government has said it has identified the cause of hike in prices of food items and adopted some measures to reduce it – this was revealed by the Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, on Wednesday while addressing State House correspondents at the end of the meeting of the Federal Executive Council, FEC.
Mr. Ogbeh said the task force set up to advise the government on how best to address the rising cost of food items across the country submitted an interim report to the council on Wednesday.
He said the committee had identified that the hike in cost is “not due to shortage but high cost of transportation”.
Food items are generally moved across Nigeria with heavy trucks and the price of diesel which has gone up has therefore, led to increase in prices.
He said the government had therefore, decided to “start using railway wagons to transport food items” to curb that.
The minister said the use of wagons to transport cattle from the north to Lagos has already greatly helped in reducing cost and will be replicated in food distribution.
“We will also work with state governments to reduce delays experienced by trucks along the roads through all sort of taxes by local governments,” he said.
Mr. Ogbeh also said the government has decided to adopt the “Ivory Coast model” in which trucks distributing food items are given special labels.
