The Executive Secretary of Produce Export Development Alliance, Adetiloye Continental in this interview speaks on the potentials and challenges of horticultural export in Nigeria. He also proffered solutions to improving agro-products export. COLLINS NNABUIFE brings excerpts.
What is the potential of Nigeria when it comes to exportation of horticultural products?
We have the capacity, I wouldn’t want to talk about the growing production capacity because that has been said over and over again, and everybody is aware of how large the arable land in Nigeria is.
In 2021, the value of fruits and vegetable export from Nigeria was worth about $191 million, and this is us not even maximizing our potential. If we can really get our acts together and get our ecosystem together in a way that it functions and remove certain bottlenecks that exists, horticultural export alone will likely rise to over $500 million by 2030, and that is the goal that we in our organization is striving to ensure that horticultural potentials can be maximized locally and we can able to use it to compete on an international stage.
How is the export of horticultural products contributing to the GDP?
We are at a critical juncture in our country where we have just got to be able to export and gain foreign exchange no matter what. One thing Nigeria is very competitive on is agricultural potentials. When we look at the flight that come in to Nigeria, they come in full and leave empty, this represents a major gap in the sense that there is something that we can actually consistently export on weekly basis, and those things are fruit, vegetable and flowers, it represents the size of contribution that the fruit and vegetable can contribute, so you find out that in 2021 the size our vegetable export was around $191 million, even though it doesn’t represent so much of big export potential like the cashew nuts segments, but it represents a growing market, year-on-year, you see more members getting into export, you increase in tonnage of visit to the airport that transfers and transport these produce to Europe. We also noticed that there is a growing and expanding Middle Eastern market which is representing the fastest growing market for our fruits, vegetables and flowers and I think in terms of contribution, this is what we will actually be focusing on.
How do the exporters handle post-harvest losses?
Post-Harvest losses are very high in Nigeria, we lose over 50 percent of our fruits and vegetables from the farmgate to the market. There is a growing number of cold logistics infrastructure in the country, we have recorded over one thousand mobile cooling trucks available in Nigeria, most of them are owned by individual and private farms that are actually geared towards export. The size of an average horticultural export is significantly larger than that of the smallholder farmer. To say that smallholder farmers should participate on export is being unfair to them because at this time, the capacity, skills and the infrastructure needed to do export is really not currently available, hence you find out that the people doing export are somewhat mid to large scale farms and there is the availability now, more accessible cold chain infrastructure. So, typically, what our members do is that they have cooling facilities on their farms where they can reduce the temperature of pepper for instance to 10 to 12 degrees and then transport these peppers using cooling vans to the airport.
However, there is significant challenge in maintaining the integrity and the quality of our exports to outside the country which is what happen at the airport, we noticed that even though an exporter or a farmer has a cold chain built into their system, they get to suffer at the tarmac where the access to cold chain is a bit restricted, that is where the major challenge is and if it spends a lot of time at the tarmac, the qualities are affected when it arrives in Europe. But as regards to handling and movement in Nigeria, mostly for export is done by cold chain.
Is there any form of training for farmers who harvest these products so that they can know how to handle them to avoid rejection?
There is training and there is ongoing training that happens from time to time. What we try to do is to train enterprise farmers who will in turn train their own smallholder farmers or cooperatives in order to be able to provide that standard. Majority of our training focuses on supporting the enterprise farmers because we believe strongly that we are actually adding value and we are equally ensuring that the larger ecosystem is preserved. Another thing that we also do is to provide certification cover, for instance, if you want to access certain markets like the European market, you will need to have some beat of certification like global gap, and usually what we do is try to provide this global gap and bridge that gap in terms of certification that you need for those markets.
What do you think is the major challenge of exporting horticultural products?
The major challenge that we have is policy and government bottlenecks. To be honest, most of our intending and active exporters are stepping up in terms of certification, quality of products, and infrastructure. The private sector is actually pulling its weight very well, but what we realized is that the processes for exporting are still not digitized, they are manual. The agencies have not done so much work in terms of awareness of what the right procedure is and most intending exporters fall into the hands of people that exploit them, and it is really sad that the government that is in need of foreign exchange is the one putting in the bottlenecks that prevents activities that lead to foreign exchange.
What do you think the government will do to ease exportation of horticultural products?
We want to increase the dialogue with the government, we want them to be able to open up more agencies to stop being revenue-generating agencies but support structures. For instance, Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS) should not be a regulator while at the same time being a certifier. I think that they should actually license the certification part to private organizations like our organization to be able to certify some parts of this chain and make it more efficient while they can be playing the role of an enforcer or regulator, that way, more innovations get to come into this space. Much of our export that we carry out in our association is done by air and we have a lot of people doing freight and I think a flat fee should be implemented so that it will increase the level of confidence in exporting through Nigeria.
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