Nigeria May Begin Mass Exportation of Fertilizers

• Nigeria May Begin Mass Exportation of Fertilizers

The Chairman, Fertilizer Producers and Suppliers Association of Nigeria, Mr. Thomas Etuh, has said that Nigeria will be in a position to export fertilizer within the next two years if current gains of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative were sustained.

Already, Etuh said the country was currently selling the important agro input to some of its neighbours such as Benin Republic, Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic, a development that could help restore Nigeria’s position as the food basket of the West African sub region.

The export opportunity from fertilizer, he stressed, would be made possible by the increased local production of fertilizer that had ramped up from a mere 500,000 metric tonnes pre-2015 to close to two million metric tonnes currently.

Etuh, who made this known in a statement, commended President, Muhammadu Buhari for initiating the PFI, which he said had helped farmers access the critical agricultural input at affordable prices, thereby reducing their overheads, boosting yields and encouraging more players to invest in the agriculture value chain.

He said, “Before the conceptualisation 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 per cent capacity on the average and that was because of the emphasis on importation. This also meant 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.

“We were lucky that we have a President that has the interest and political will to make a difference and ready to make this initiative work. And those of us in the fertilizer blending industry had no option but to key into this willingness. We were made to understand that beyond the profits necessary for our businesses, it was important for us to see the project as critical to nation building. We were made to appreciate the roles we had to play, first as citizens and then as businesses,” he added.