The Minister of Agriculture, Akinwunmi Adesina on Saturday affirmed that Nigeria will not face any food crisis as a result of the recent flood disaster that has affected a number of states across the country.

The Minister confirmed that prior to the flood disaster, the Goodluck Jonathan’s administration at its inception, made plans to increase the nation’s food production by 20 million metric tonnes annually and this has led to an addition of about 8.1 million metric tonnes of food to the nation’s food supply for the year 2012.

Mr Adesina, who was a guest on Channels Television’s weekend programme Sunrise, said though a large number of farm lands were affected by the flood, the lost does not translate to a proportionate crop loss.

He said: “there were shocks to the system” as a result of the flood, but we “have a robust plan in place to produce more foods in the dry season and also plans to move farmers to areas of the nation’s arable land that were not affected by the flood”.

“Taraba is one of the most affected states during the peak of the flooding that lasted from October 11-15. 349,000 hectares of land in the state was inundated but that does not mean it will lead to resultant crop-loss. Probably about 100,000 hectares was just affected in terms of crop loss.”

“Also in Anambra, 118,000 hectares of land was affected by the flood but just about 42,000 of the land will lead to crop loss” the Minister explained.

“Nigeria doesn’t have a food crisis and we do not have famine” he affirmed, adding that “we have satellite images and remote sensing data to confirm this.”

The Minister also revealed plans by the federal government to supply improve seeds and fertilizers to farmers across the country, noting that 1.4million farmers have been reached in the last 140 days via the new electronic wallet system that the government introduced to eliminate rent-seekers and politicians involved in the scheme of fertilizers distribution, which he claims never gets to the farmers.

He also explained that the Ministry of Finance is currently working out modalities to guarantee 70 per cent of loans that banks will be giving to agro-allied industries, in a bid to drive down the interest rate of loans to farmers from double digits to a single digit.

This amongst other things were narrated by the Minister of Agriculture has measures taken by the federal government to mitigate against any possible effect of the flood.