Nigeria can generate 4.5 billion dollars annually from cashew exportation, Mr Olusegun Awolowo, Executive Director, Nigerian Export Promotion Council, has said.
Awolowo announced this in a statement by Mr
Joe Itah, Head, Corporate
Communications of the council, in Abuja on Tuesday. The executive director ,who
said this at a facility visit to the Valency Cashew Processing Limited, urged
the company to sustain its production capacity and focus more on
value-addition for the product.
In view (of the need) to scale
up production and processing of cashew for exports for more foreign exchange
for the country, I implore the company to pay attention to quality standard and
value-addition of cashew for exports.
This is because the commodity
commands a global export value of over 4.5 billion dollars annually, which
Nigeria should aim to grab a fair market share.
He said the visit was to
identify areas of intervention on ways to develop and promote cashew as a major
export product of the Commodity Export Company at Ibafo, Ogun.
Awolowo urged the management of the company to
support the growth of commodity exports by ramping up production of cashew. He said that as at 2015,
Nigeria produced a mere 160,000 tonnes of the nuts worth 253 million dollars
for exports.
According to him, currently the
larger quantity of the production capacity is Raw Cashew Nuts (RCN)
whereas processing even 50 per cent of same volume will create about 9,000 jobs.
Awolowo explained that cashew was one of the
13 National Strategic Export Products chosen by Federal Government under
Category B of Zero Oil Plan.
He added that it was one of the
strategies highlighted in the recently launched Economic Recovery and Growth
Plan (ERGP) to emancipate Nigeria from dependence on single commodity for
survival.
He expressed confidence that
some degree of palliation would come the way of exporters when implementation
of the new Export Expansion Grant scheme commenced.
Mr Basba-Nand Balodi , Managing Director of the
company, decried the lack of funds for acquisition of modern processing
machines and inadequate export incentives.
Balodi said the others were the dearth of
infrastructure, particularly power and roads which ultimately increased cost of
doing business, making the product less competitive.
He acknowledged the council’s
role in bolstering the non-oil export economic sector through continuous
engagements and interventions on proactive programmes that would usher best practices and
promote the ease of doing business.
Balodi called for the creation of a governing
council for cashew sector under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture.
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