… Nigeria spends $600m on imports
One of the emerging indigenous farms is about to revolutionise the production of kenaf, which for decades has been ignored by many Nigerian farmers but has huge potentials for a range of value chain products.
National Coordinator of Nigeria Farmers Groups and Cooperative Societies, who is also Managing Director of NFGCS Farms Limited, Mr Retson Tedheke, explained why the farm going into massive kenaf production.
Kenaf plant is a source of textile fibre used in making jute bags and rope, and is suitable for a range of paper and cardboard products. It is also used for building materials because of its fibre strength, as well as a range of other products like media acoustics due to sound-proofing properties of the crop.
For many years, absence of jute bags has affected the farmers’ ability to store grains properly resulting in the high prevalence of aflatoxins and other mycotoxin contaminations in the country-a situation that not only affect the price of grains but also export quality of these products.
Conducting Daily Trust around the Kenaf plantation at the farm site in Ga’ate Kokona, Nasarawa State, Mr Tedheke explained why they are going into massive cultivation of Kenaf in collaboration with the state government.
“Nigerians spends about 600 million dollars to import Kenaf. We are discussing with the Nasarawa State government to plant a thousand hectares of Kenaf and open the state for the production of the crop,” Tedheke said.
The farmers want a share of that $600 million figure of import because according to them, there is huge internal market even in the building industry as the crop is a major raw material used for making POP (Plaster of Paris) ceilings.
With the massive production, they are expecting to attract solid partnership with investors to take a chunk of that market and cut a cake of that multimillion dollar industry.
While reacting to social media controversy over Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s comments that the NFGCS grew their farm investment from N1.5 million to N1.5 billion in three years, the farmers’ group said their current farm investment was actually worth more than N1.5 billion.
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