- By Femi Alabi
The World Trade Organisation(WTO) has inaugurated a 1.2 million dollar programme to improve export standard of Nigeria’s sesame and cowpea products.
The WTO Director-General, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, stated this at the lnauguration of the Seven Trade support programmes for Nigeria initiated by the WTO, World Bank and ITC on Tuesday in Abuja.
Okonjo-Iweala said the projects aimed at tackling cases of rejection of Nigeria’s products at the international market.
She stressed that the project, was inaugurated with the Standards Trade Development Facility (STDF), International Trade Centre(ITC), and the Nigeria Export Promotion Council (NEPC,).
According to her, the project will support international safety and quality certification for sesame and cowpeas 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.
According to the director-general, some of Nigeria’s unrealised potential has to do with trade-related problems on the supply side, and that is what this project is seeking to rectify.
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Okonjo-Iweala noted that 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.
She 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.
According to Okonjo-Iweala, this new project aims to build the capacities of stakeholders across the sesame and cowpeas value chains to better understand market access requirements.
She said it would improve agricultural practices such as pesticide application, hygiene techniques, harvest and post-harvest methods, and food safety.
She said : “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.”