By Adedapo Adesanya
The Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Mrs Mojisola Adeyeye, has said about 82 per cent of Nigeria’s agricultural products exported illegally were seized by European Union countries.
The NAFDAC head said this as she lamented the alarming rate of rejections of food exports from Nigeria due to the non-involvement of the agency in the screening and certification of such goods.
She said that agricultural commodities that Nigeria exported within the first nine months of 2022 generated N427.6 billion ($1.02 billion).
However, Mrs Adeyeye said there was more that could be done for the country to attain proper exporting status in agriculture and called on exporters to allow the appropriate authorities to do their jobs.
She said NAFDACS’s concern came just as pre-shipment inspection agents pledged to henceforth collaborate with regulatory agencies to eliminate the rejection of Nigerian food exports through a unified exportation procedure.
This will help find lasting solutions to the challenge of rejecting non-oil export from the country, the NAFDAC DG said.
She said the agency decided to once again extend hands of collaboration to critical stakeholders in the nation’s ports, which spurred the consultative meeting with pre-shipment inspection agents held last Friday in Lagos.
A statement signed by the NAFDAC’s Resident Media Consultant, Mr Sayo Akintola, quoted Mrs Adeyeye as having expressed worry that “a competent authority on food safety matter with all her acclaimed global accreditation in food safety testing could be totally blanked out in the listed requirements for issuance of Clean Certificate of Inspection (CCI) by the Pre-shipment Inspection Agents.
“No wonder there are high volumes of reject from Nigeria as the NAFDAC regulated products were not tested nor production processes validated for compliance before export.”
Mrs Adeyeye was represented by the Director of Port Inspection Directorate (PID), who also heads the Office of Trade and International Relations (OTIR), Mrs Abimbola Adegboye.
She pointed out that the meeting was aimed at building effective collaboration with NAFDAC to complement its robust regulatory policies geared toward understanding the NAFDAC export processes, collaboration to safeguard a unified exportation procedure and zero rejects of Nigeria export products.
The NAFDAC boss noted that the agency acknowledges the importance of having broader and deeper interactions and collaborations with sister agencies such as the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), Nigeria Export Promotion Council (NEPC), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), etc.
Mrs Adeyeye also emphasised the position of export as a key factor in every country’s economy, adding that the reason for regulation of the sector was to ensure that products that leave a country’s shores were of good quality, safe and meet international best practices, among others.
“For Nigeria, trade is critical to the national economic makeup”, adding that in 2021, “Nigeria exported $57.7 billion of goods, making it the world’s 52nd most exporting country.”
The DG NAFDAC listed reasons for export rejection to include technical barrier issues, defective packaging and inadequate labelling, non-documentation, unauthorised transition, illegal importation and non-compliance to destination markets standards.
She said authorities of the European Union would always reject consignments containing food that does not comply with EU maximum residue limits (MRLs) for Vet Medicine and Pesticides and maximum limits (MLs) for Contaminants in foods.
Modupe Gbadeyanka