Background: Rice (Oryza sativa) is the most consumed staple food in Nigeria. Consumers have persistently preferred and are willing to pay higher prices for imported rice despite improvements in the quality attributes of local rice brands in the last 5 years. Nigeria’s import bill of over $6million daily on rice is not only a drain on the country’s Forex reserves, but a threat to the development of the domestic rice industry. Previous studies on rice consumers’ behaviours have not explained the underlying reason of how consumers with imported brands preference mind-set make purchasing decisions when faced with both local and imported rice brands with almost similar quality attributes but different market prices.Aim: When making purchase decisions, consumers consider product quality in comparison to its price. This study attempts to explain how the differences in prices and quality attributes of local and imported rice brands determine consumer’s inertia against preference for imported rice brands in Nigeria.Setting: This study was conducted in the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria using data sets collected from a survey of 460 rice consumer households.Methods: Data were collected using a structured questionnaire administered to the household heads during the face-to-face interview. Two separate binary logit regression models were estimated for households’ preference and WTP for imported rice.Results: The results show that price, household head’s age, household’s income and general perception are statistically significant variables explaining household’s preference and WTP for imported rice brands. Consumers’ inertia against preference and WTP for imported rice persists because of the negative price–quality differential gaps between local and imported rice brands.Conclusion: Rice consumers in Nigeria compare price and quality differentials before making a choice between local and imported rice brands. There is need for implementation of flexible and synergic import restriction and strategic marketing policies that sustain wide price differentials between local and imported rice brands, while improving the quality image of the local brands to narrow consumer’s perception of the quality differential between these two sets of brands.
With an average annual import bill of USD 300 million,Nigeria is the Africa’s largest rice consuming and importingcountry. This has been attributed to the poor qualityof locally produced rice. Despite huge investments of overUSD 1.65 billion made by government and private sectorsin rice processing over the last six years – which has led todramatic improvements in the quality of local rice brands –the consumers’ preference for imported rice brands persists.Prioritizing the implementation of consumer demand-focuseddomestic marketing policies and programs could encouragethe consumers’ acceptability of local rice brands. Therefore,this study attempts to provide some insight, from the consumerperspective, on the local rice marketing managers’ need toimprove their functions. A binary logistic model was estimatedusing a 2014 dataset collected from a survey with 460 riceconsumer households in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT)of Nigeria. The results showed empirical evidence for the consumers’acceptability of local rice brands in Nigeria and theneed for improvements in marketing functions that enhancethe promotion and distribution of local rice brands. The implicationsof these findings for the development of Nigeria’s ricemarketing policy are discussed.
Nigeria's spending of US$2billion annually on rice importation has been considered a major source of foreign exchange drain and a threat to domestic rice industry. One of the major reasons adduced for this high import bills is the persistent demand-supply gap arising from the country's inability to increase domestic output of paddy rice to optimize the total capacity of several integrated rice mills established across the country in the last 15 years. In 2015, the government launched the Anchor Borrowers' Programme (ABP) to make cheap funds accessible to smallholder farmers (SHFs) who produce more than 85% of total farm output in Nigeria. ABP is designed to encourage banks to lend to SHFs to boost paddy rice production. This paper presents the field experiences of SHFs, banks and rice millers who participated in the programme in 2016/2017. This paper concludes that ABP is a laudable programme that can contribute in achieving the food security objective of the government. The key challenges found to be threatening the success and sustainability of ABP included delays in timely disbursement of funds by deposit money banks (DMBs), inadequate personnel and institutional framework, side-selling of harvested paddy rice by SHFs, State government undue involvement in the ABP, and poor rural infrastructure. Policy recommendations to strengthen the ABP model for improved impact were discussed.Key Lessons from the 2015 -2017 ABP: Field experience of DMBs indicated that farmers in the more remote rural areas easily repaid their loans more than those in the Urban and semi-urban areas. Farmers in urban and semi-urban areas were mostly civil servants who are already indebted to other lenders. There was higher loan recovery from farmers who owned just one hectare of farmland than those who owned more than one hectare. This agrees with the findings of Oke et al. (2007) and Kohansal and Manosoori (2009) who in
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