The World Trade Organisation(WTO) has launched a $1.2 million programme to improve the export standard of Nigeria’s agricultural products, particularly sesame and cowpea products.
WTO Director-general, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, made this known at the inauguration of the Seven Trade support programmes for Nigeria initiated by the WTO, World Bank and ITC, in Abuja.
She explained that the aim of the programme is to tackle cases of rejection of Nigeria’s products at the international market.
Okonjo-Iweala said the project was inaugurated with the Standards Trade Development Facility (STDF), International Trade Centre (ITC), and the Nigeria Export Promotion Council (NEPC), adding that the project will support international safety and quality certification for sesame and cowpea in Nigeria.
She said Nigeria’s agriculture sector had the potential to be a major driver of export diversification and job creation, but too much of this potential remained unrealised due to barriers.
“We all know the story about Nigeria being a significant exporter of palm kernel, groundnuts, palm oil, cotton and cocoa, but the country has since become a net importer of many of these goods.
“In fact, Nigeria has not only lost out in agricultural export markets, it is a net food importer spending about billions a year for goods, many of which we can also produce here.
“Nigeria used to be a formidable agricultural exporter. Up to the mid-1960s, the country’s share of world agricultural exports was more than one per cent.
“However, agricultural exports collapsed as the economy shifted towards petroleum exploitation, and by the mid-1980s Nigeria’s world market share for agricultural products has dwindled to less than 0.1 per cent,” she said.
The WTO director-general said some of Nigeria’s unrealised potential has to do with trade-related problems on the supply side, and that is what the project seeks to rectify.
She said Nigeria was the world’s largest producer and consumer of cowpeas and the world’s producer of sesame, exporting to the EU, Türkiye, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian markets.
Okonjo-Iweala further said Nigerian cowpea and sesame exports had increasingly faced rejections in several destination markets due to non-compliance with international Standard Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) requirements.
She explained that this new project aims to build the capacities of stakeholders across the sesame and cowpeas value chains to better understand market access requirements and that it would improve agricultural practices such as pesticide application, hygiene techniques, harvest and post-harvest methods, and food safety.
“The project which will kick off with an initial amount of 1.2 million dollars of which nearly a million comes from STDF will also be used to train local food safety advisers.
“This type of project is one I term a low expenditure, high impact project. The WTO is not a financing agency like the World Bank or IMF, but it has a wonderful secret that I find very attractive.
“It spends small sums of money to make big impact. You can not imagine how a million-dollar intervention can earn Nigeria hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions in increased agricultural exports.
“Supporting improved incomes for farmers, exporters, businesses and others once agriculture producers and exporters follow the correct sanitary and phytosanitary standards,” she added.
Executive director, NEPPC, Nonye Ayeni, reiterated the challenges of rejection faced by Nigerian food exports, including sesame and cowpea.
She said the challenges were mainly due to poor quality, inefficient procedures and documentation, sanitary and Phyto-sanitary issues, and improper packaging and labelling, among others.
She said: “a good number of these factors led to the decision of WTO/ITC to sponsor the STDF project, which will be backed by expected 30 per cent counterpart funding from NEPC.”
