There is no reason why Nigeria should not regain its lost glory in palm oil production

The story has been told so many times over the years such that we seem to have become desensitised to its negative import for our economic and overall development. We refer to the oft-repeated tale of how Malaysia, now the world’s second-largest producer and exporter of palm oil after Indonesia, first came to Nigeria to source oil palm seedlings in the 1960s. While we readily obliged that country’s request at the time and Malaysia has gone on to maximally tap the potential of the crop to promote her socio-economic development, Nigeria has inexcusably left severely underdeveloped an agricultural crop which she is abundantly endowed to produce and which should be a source of prosperity to her people.

It has been estimated that in 2020, for instance, Malaysia exported 16.2 million metric tonnes of palm oil valued at about 73.3 billion Malaysian Ringgit and that the value added to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the palm oil industry is worth about 36.9 billion Ringgit. Revenue from palm oil is reported to have helped reduce poverty levels in Malaysia from 50 per cent in the 1960s to less than five percent today.

A reminder of how much of an untapped gold mine palm oil continues to be in Nigeria was reechoed by a recent exhaustive analytic feature article in the Daily Trust newspaper. One striking revelation in the report is that Nigeria imported no less than N299.6 billion worth of palm oil in the six years from 2017 to 2022. This was despite the fact that in 2015, palm oil was one of the products on a list of items compiled by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) which would no longer benefit from foreign exchange support by the apex bank.

The aim was to discourage the allocation of foreign exchange for items that could be produced locally, reduce the pressure on foreign exchange, strengthen the value of the Naira and boost local production of such items. Yet, despite this measure, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reports that palm oil consistently continued to rank among the top five imported agricultural products into the country.