Nigeria has the potential of increasing its revenue from horticultural export to $500m, if the country can full tap into the promises hold by this industry and ensures that all the bottlenecks debarring its growth are adequately addressed.
The Executive Secretary, Produce Export Development Alliance (PEDA), formerly known as the Agricultural Fresh Produce Growers and Exporters Association of Nigeria (AFGEAN), Adetiloye Aiyeola, who disclosed this in an interview, said as at 2021, the value of fruits and vegetable export from Nigeria was worth about $191m, noting that this can increased to $500m in 2030.
He said: “In 2021, the value of fruits and vegetable export from Nigeria was worth about $191m, and we are not even maximising 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 $500m by 2030, and that is the goal that our organisation is striving towards, to ensure that horticultural potentials can be maximised locally and we can use it to compete on the international stage.
“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 that Nigeria is very competitive on is agricultural potentials. When we look at the flights that come into the country, 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 fruits, vegetables and flowers.
“It represents the size of contribution that the fruits and vegetables can contribute, so you find out that in 2021 the size of our vegetable export was around $191m, 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 see increase in tonnage of visits 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 represent 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,” he said.
Aiyeola identified post-harvest losses as a major challenge confronting the industry, noting that post-harvest losses are very high in Nigeria, as the country is losing over 50 per cent of fruits and vegetables from the farm gate to the market.
He added that there is a growing number of cold logistics infrastructure in the country, as the country currently has over 1, 000 mobile cooling trucks, most of them owned by individuals 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,” the PEDA Executive Secretary said.
Aiyeola said the organisation is trying to train enterprise farmers who will in turm train their smallholder farmers or cooperatives on how to handle the produce to a void rejection and to provide a standard produce.
“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.
“The major challenge we have in exporting horticultural products 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 realised is that the processes for exporting are still not digitised, they are manual. The agencies have not done so much works 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,” he said.
