Stakeholders
in the real sector including experts on trade and maritime matters have said
that if the regulatory authorities in the various sectors are focused and
impediments to trade are eliminated, there will be increase in merchandise
exports from Nigeria.
They
said this during a one-day capacity building workshop for journalists and
public relations officers in the maritime sector, hosted by the APM Terminals in Lagos.
Speaking
during the workshop, the Head of Government, Stakeholder Relations and
Communications, APM Terminals Apapa, Austin
Fischer, lamented that poor infrastructure and storage facilities had
limited Nigeria’s capacity to compete in the global market space.
He
said, as a result of poor infrastructure and high transportation costs, about
15 million metric tonnes of Nigerian-grown perishable goods were being lost
annually through spoilage and product damage. He listed some of the affected
goods as onions, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, okra, ginger and carrots.
To address
the storage problems, he said APMT recently commenced work on the provision of
modern cold chain transportation alternatives for farmers in the agricultural
centres of northern Nigeria to bring fresh produce intact to the market centres
in Lagos.
Nigeria’s
merchandise exports, according to a United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development statistics, dropped by 36.2 per cent in 2016. There was, however,
an improvement in the second quarter of 2017, as reported by the National
Bureau of Statistics.
In the
second quarter of 2017, merchandise exports reached N3bn, representing 78.3 per
cent increase over the same period in 2016.
Stakeholders
said policy changes on the part of government accounted for the improvement and
they stressed that more needed to be done to position Nigeria as a leading
player not only in the oil business but also in the non-oil export trade.
In his
budget speech for 2016, President
Muhammadu Buhari had made provisions for the export sector and revived the Export Expansion Grant, which was
suspended in 2012 following reports of widespread abuses.
The
Publicity Secretary of the National Cashew Association of Nigeria, Sotonye Anga, said this and that the
government’s decision to expand the incentives’ basket by reviving all the
dormant incentives would increase the export trade.
The
Chairman, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, Export Promotion Group, Chief Ede Dafinone, newsmen that with
incentives and removal of impediments to trade such as high tariffs at the
ports, the merchandise trade would witness a boost by the second quarter of
2018.
According
to Fischer, in order to ease processes and reduce the cost of doing business at
the ports, the APMT had fully developed and modernised its terminal at Apapa,
Lagos and invested over N126bn in the development of container handling and
stacking yards, container inspection facilities, sophisticated and ultramodern
cargo handling equipment, information technology, automation, human resources,
simulator and rail sidings to ease the gridlock along the port access roads.
An
expert and lecturer at the Lagos Business School, Dr. Frank Ojadi, said to have improvement in the trade balance of
the nation, policy consistency was important, especially among the various
agencies regulating operations at the ports which was the major platform for
international trade. (Punch)
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