THE Nigerian Export Promotion Council ( NEPC) is proposing the establishment of an Export Trading Company ( ETC) as a means of creating and making available an accessible market for farmers in order to boost productivity whereby increasing Nigeria’s export.
Speaking in Egypt at the Intra-African trade fair, the Executive Director of NEPC, Segun Awolowo Said an Export Trading Company will provide the basic market access to farmers and also improve the country’s export capacity.
He explained that “we are looking at establishing an Export Trading Company, it will not be in the model of the old Commodity Exchange Boards, not that, the idea is to have a powerful company, not like the Commodity Exchange which is just a trading platform where you trade your goods but a Company where you can also invest “.
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“For instance, ETC can buy up your Cashew and save the farmers from the challenge of looking for buys. The company will not just be able to buy, store, processed, but also sell off just almost like an aggregator. We need a huge company like that, with business sense backed with money “.
“So we are looking at big government interventions, so ETC will be public sector funded but private sector driven” noting that he presented the proposal recently in a meeting with CBN and Commercial Banks. “At the end of the meeting, the CBN Governor constituted a Committee comprising of NEPC, NEXIM bank, the department of development control of CBN and two commercial banks, the Committee is Chaired by the Managing Director of UBA”Awolowo sated.
According to him, “the Committee have February to submit their report which is perfect for us because we were working with the Federal Executive Councils Committee on export promotion, which the CBN is also a member, but we were working in isolation. But now we have it thrown up so we can really get commercial private sector thinking to it”.
He explained further that, we had a problem with our Cashew in Vietnam, farmers couldn’t sell off 30 thousand metrics tonnes because they crashed the price in Vietnam. It had nothing to do with us, nothing to do with quality, everything was perfect. They had some crisis receiving funding so they wanted the price to crashed “.
“But we knew booming Cashew market then will get to a stage where the price will crash, and we knew the trench hold we had, I think we had one thousand, one hundred dollars before the price went down but then, it was trading at one thousand eight hundred dollars, our people made money but Vietnamese couldn’t absorb it again, so we had crisis ” Awolowo explained.
He noted that if the country had an Export Trading Company, the company would have been able to salvage the situation. “But that is what ETC can take up so that our farmers do not have to suffer losses unnecessary and because the company is heavily funded because the banks are there, the risks are mitigated “.
Awolowo said the company will have the capacity to buy processing machines. “If you want to compete out there, then you really have to scale up your production. You can not be a major player in the Cocoa industry when you are still processing 250,000 metrics tonnes, how? ” he questioned.
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