How Nigeria can regain its top status

NIGERIA’S ambition to diversify its economy away from crude oil sales has hit a rough patch. Instead of increasing, the World Trade Organisation stated last week that Nigeria had lost its leading position in the agriculture export market because its agricultural commodities fail to meet the sanitary and phytosanitary requirements for the international markets.

Given the huge potential of agricultural exports to the Nigerian economy, this is an unsavoury development. President Bola Tinubu and the regulatory bodies need to strengthen agricultural produce safety, as well as animal and plant health capacity for the country to regain its top continental status in exports.

The Director-General of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who twice served as Nigeria’s finance minister, during the inauguration of trade support programmes in Abuja, said, “The agriculture sector in Nigeria has the potential to be a major driver of export diversification and job creation – but too much of this potential remains unrealised, due to a variety of barriers.”

Okonjo-Iweala stated that Nigeria’s cowpea and sesame exports were increasingly facing rejection in several destination markets due to non-compliance with international sanitary and phytosanitary requirements. This failure to comply with regional, global and import country regulations, she pointed out, had resulted in loss of sales, revenue, and hard currency due to export rejects.

Therefore, the Nigerian authorities should act swiftly. Since 2015, the European Union had banned beans imports from Nigeria. In enforcing the ban, the EU cited a high level of contamination, as the beans contain “up to 0.3 milligrams per kilogram of dichlorvos in contrast to the legal limit in Europe, which is 0.01 milligrams.” As this was nearly a decade ago, it means the method used in preserving beans in Nigeria still falls below the international standard.

Like many other countries, Nigeria partly relies on non-oil exports to balance its books. Data provided by the Nigerian Export Promotion Council showed that non-oil exports totalled $3.45 billion in 2021 and grew by 39.91 per cent in 2022 to $4.82 billion. In 2023, the country attracted $4.5 billion from non-oil exports, per NEPC, noting that there was a decline in its revenues by 6.25 per cent.

Cocoa beans have been estimated to account for almost 90 per cent of the $804 million of Nigerian cocoa exports. In 2022 alone, Nigeria exported $489 million in cocoa beans to destinations which included the Netherlands, Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, and the United States, according to data by the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Tellingly, agricultural experts have highlighted challenges confronting cocoa exportation, which include a lack of infrastructure, inadequate modern facilities and pests and diseases.

Not only are citizens’ health endangered by the lack of safety of non-oil exports, but Nigeria is also forced to expend huge resources on importing foods which could be cultivated domestically. Nigeria imports foods annually with $15 billion, says the Central Bank of Nigeria.

To regain its top status, Nigerian stakeholders need to put in place policies and mechanisms that would facilitate and enhance the exporting of agricultural produce and remove the bottlenecks hampering trade and investment.

The federal and state governments need to improve infrastructural capacity, such as power and transport, and tackle the negative impact of the gridlock at the seaports on the shelf-life of agricultural produce. Farmers should form cooperatives to share ideas and receive training in modern ways of preserving foodstuff.

There should be regular seminars at the grassroots aimed at the proper packaging of exports that should be devised by the federal and state governments in collaboration with the standard regulatory bodies and industries to ensure that the quality and safety standards of export produce are guaranteed.