Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, says the Federal Government is working to combat some of the issues contributing to the high cost of food in the country.

Addressing a press conference at the Presidential Villa in Abuja on Tuesday, the Minister listed some possible factors for the price hike.

“Apart from haulage, we have issues of road networks that are also an impediment to that. Then also, other stumbling blocks, and the government is doing as much as possible to address some of these issues.”

He, however, said the challenges is that many of the issues concerning the movement of food stuffs is not only within the purview of the Federal government, saying, “you know, sometimes it’s not within the purview of the federal government. For instance, some local governments will just put a roadblock and charge unnecessary tolls or charges or levies on food transportation. So these are areas that we are looking into.

“Actually, a committee was set up by the Federal Executive Council to bring up a report on how to address those issues. So one way of reducing transportation costs, as we all know, is the introduction of the CNG trucks, and we have seen the explosion of that interest.

“So once we can bring down the cost of transportation, also food prices will also come down.”

The Minister who spoke about the issue of post harvest loses said, “We’re also looking at cold storage, if you remember, the Renewed Hope Infrastructure Fund, one of the items there, very prominent is cold storage, and that is to avoid what we know as the losses and this thing in terms of fruits and vegetables.

” This is very key at the heart of Mr. President and in addition, I must say here and also declare that we are also looking into some of the storage facilities that were concessioned. You are aware that out of 31 silos’ sites belonging to the federal government, 17 were concessioned some time ago.

“We are doing our assessment. So far, what we have seen is only three are performing. So we are going to revisit that.

“We are going to have our meetings with the concessionaires and also with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, to see with a view of looking at those concession terms again.”