Home BUSINESS AGRICULTURE Nigeria Begins Exporting Yam To United Kingdom

Nigeria Begins Exporting Yam To United Kingdom

Yam

Nigeria has begun the exportation of yam tubers to the United Kingdom, in addition to exportation of cashew nuts to other countries like the United States of America, the Vietnam and others.

The minister of agriculture, Chief Audu Ogbe, who announced this shortly after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, today, Wednesday, said that the yam importation will be flagged off tomorrow, Thursday.

“Tomorrow we shall flag off this export in three container loads containing 72tones of Nigerian yams. Two containers went out in February; one arrived in New York on the 16th of this month. “This is important because for those of you who travel and many Nigerians out there, you go to shops where they sell African foods and you never see anything from Nigeria. It is mostly called Ghana yams. Now we account for 61% of the total output of yams in the world according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the rest is shared amongst some countries in the West Africa and the West Indies.

“For us to go abroad and not find Nigerian yams in the market, it is an embarrassment.

Because Ghana is targeting $4 billion of yams in the next three years and if they can do that, we who are the masters of yam production have no business lagging behind. We don’t even consume all the yams we produce here because most of it is lost to wastages because of poor technologies in preservation.

“We are going to solar coolers in yam markets and yam producing areas to keep the temperature at 14 degrees Celsius, not frozen but to keep it at that temperature so that it can be good all year round and can last up to two to three years in the containers.

“Essentially, we are making this point because we are diversifying the economy; we are talking about economic recovery and growth and we will have to export whatever is needed from Nigeria by other countries so we can earn more foreign exchange rather than expend everything we have on importation.

“If they want yams we will sell yams, if they want pepper we will sell pepper, if they want ginger we will sell ginger. Just like we buy so much from them, it is time for them to buy from

  1. I assure you this is how the economy of Nigeria we are dreaming of is going to recover.

“The only challenge we may face will be the question of labour. The young men who make heaps are reducing in number because they are moving to the cities riding okada and looking for white collar jobs.

“To solve that problem, we are mechanizing the production of yams. We have designed a new plough that will be attached to the tractor to make  the yam heap, the current ploughs we have cannot make a heap.

“In Ilorin, the Nigerian Centre for Agric Mechanization is producing a new plough that can make the yam heaps and once that is in operation, we will mechanize the production. We should look at the opportunity to export yams not as a problem but as an economic opportunity.”

The minister said that Nigerian government had so far shipped some consignments of yam to the US.

Audu Ogbe said that the other good news is cashew nuts which though look small, but is making a lot of money for the country.

“We are in conversations with Walmart, the biggest supermarket chain in the US. They came here and asked us to roast cashew nuts for them. Their demand is a 130,000 tonnes of cashew nuts per annum and the total value is $7 billion, but what we are doing now is shipping raw cashew to Vietnam; they are the ones roasting and selling to the US. This year, we are going to create six cashew processing factories in Nigeria, to be sited in Enugu, Imo, Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Oyo states. These are the cashew belt for now. [myad]