•Our public and private sectors must brace up for global trade
AFTER many years of periodic rejection of food from Nigeria, the EU has now banned importation of 24 food items from Nigeria. The items include beans, palm oil, sesame seeds, shelled groundnut, peanut chips, snails, smoked and dried fish and meat, and melon seeds. Reasons for the ban range from wrong labelling of produce, substandard packaging, mould in food, and overuse of pesticides and other chemicals that can cause cancer in humans.
For example, palm oil imported from Nigeria is alleged to contain a colouring agent that can be carcinogenic while groundnut contains aflatoxin. Analysis by European Commission’s Rapid Safety Alert System has revealed that Nigerian beans contain between 0.03-4.6mg/kg of Dichlorvos pesticide where maximum acceptable limit for human consumption is 0.01mg/kg.
In the century of globalisation, processed and semi-processed food products are bound to travel across national borders to meet increasing multicultural demands for ethnic food. Exportation of food from Nigeria is in character with rise in globalisation. Other countries with similar food items that Nigeria exports, such as Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, etc., also export their agricultural produce to Europe and the Americas.
In addition, the new fiscal emphasis on diversification of Nigeria’s economy calls for increase in revenue streams, especially foreign exchange. Therefore, food export should be a regular economic activity in the country, as it is in many other West African countries. But we should make serious efforts to cure the country of failure of regulation and infrastructure.
For example, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council recently announced its special awareness seminar for food exporters on the need to comply with good agricultural and food handling practices. This announcement shows that it started such training after periodic rejection of food from Nigeria between 2015 and now. Further, the organisation created to ensure food and drug safety, the National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), has been assuring citizens for the past three years about its efforts: “NAFDAC and other regulatory agencies of the government are working round the clock to ensure that when the ban is lifted, we can then begin to export more agricultural products to the EU.”
As reassuring as the statement from NAFDAC sounds, such assurance is rather belated. Prevention is better than cure should have been the motto of organisations charged with ensuring that food consumed in the country, imported to the country, and exported from the country meet required standards of global trade.
Governments need to pay more attention to Nigeria’s export. It is obvious that exporters are working under inferior infrastructure: no guaranteed electricity supply, little or no potable water supply in most states, and over-centralisation of regulatory agencies. Most food regulatory agencies abroad are not likely to tolerate half-hearted measures that lack of infrastructure forced on many businesses in the country.
Although regional or state marketing boards are no longer fashionable, governments can borrow some of the methods of processing agricultural products for export used in the era of regional marketing boards for quality control. Government-supported efforts for full exposure of exporters to rigorous demands for export of agricultural produce may help to discourage frivolous exporters who choose food export because of unemployment. Exporters must be properly vetted for registration and be given support to do the right thing while regulatory agencies should be supported to ensure that each exporter has the right staff to ensure high standards for food export.
Regulatory agencies, especially NAFDAC and the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) have to be made to live up to their charge. It is good to organise training on acceptable food processing standards for people who want to export food but this is not enough. Food items from Nigeria that Europe has rejected also come into Europe from Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo, Republic of Benin, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. If these countries can send acceptable food to Europe and other parts of the world, Nigeria should have no excuse. It is embarrassing that the only country marked down for exporting unsafe food from West Africa to Europe for the past three years is Nigeria. More embarrassing is that if the food we export is substandard, what does this say about what our 170 million citizens eat at home, where there is little or no attention to what gets to the local food market?
We can do better than this and should do so fast. No responsible government pays inadequate attention to threats to public health from food meant for export and local consumption.
