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Fri, Mar

Nigeria To Begin Mass Exportation Of Fertilizer In Two Years

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Chairman of Fertilizer Producers and Suppliers Association of Nigeria (FEPSAN) Mr Thomas Etuh, has said Nigeria will be in good position to export fertilizer within the next two years if current gains of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI) are sustained.

According to Etuh, the country is currently selling the important agro input to some of Nigeria’s neighbours like Benin Republic, Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic, a development he says, will help restore the country’s position as the food basket of the West African subregion.

The export opportunity from fertilizer, he revealed, will be made possible by the enlarged local production of fertilizer that has ramped up from a mere 500,000 metric tonnes pre-2015 to close to 2 million metric tonnes currently.

Mr Etuh, who made this public in a statement in Abuja on Monday, commended the President, Muhammadu Buhari for initiating the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative, which he said, has helped farmers access the critical agricultural input at affordable prices thereby reducing their overheads, boosting yield and encouraging more players to invest in the agriculture value chain.

“Before the conceptualization and activation of the PFI, we had a situation where there were 32 fertilizer blending plants in Nigeria that were moribund.

Out of this number, only five blending plants were functional and even then, they were producing at 10 percent capacity on the average and that was owing to the excessive emphases on importation.

This also meant, by its very implication, that we were exporting our jobs even when we cannot provide jobs here in Nigeria. Foreign Exchange that is scarce is spent building other people’s economies,” he stated.

He added that Nigerians must make concerted efforts to show commitment towards solving the employment challenges that has been mounting in the country over the past decades and was sure that one of the critical planks of reversing the trend was a sustained investment in agriculture in such as creative way as not to create losses on both the government and the people.

He also commended the President for showing what he called the “political will” that has made it possible for the initiative to become a huge success, expressing his optimism that the journey towards food security for Nigeria may well have begun on a sound footing with the huge impact the PFI programme has made on the volume of food production in Nigeria within only two years.

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