Nigeria will produce 48 per cent more food, or €62.6 billion, between 2021 and 2024, according to OTACCWA and Fairtrade.
The Nigeria Agrofood and Plastprintpack trade exhibition organizers, Fairtrade and OTACCWA, said in a statement that the country’s food output increased from €26 billion in 2016 to €36.3 billion in 2020, a 39.6% improvement.
According to a senior project manager at Fairtrade, Freyja Detjen, igeria ranked as Africa’s second-largest investor in 2022 with investments in food and packaging technologies totaling €363m, behind only South Africa with €381m and Egypt leading with €319m.
“Food production in Nigeria has experienced a remarkable surge of 39.6% in recent years, from €26bn in 2016 to €36.3bn in 2020, projected to rise by 48 per cent between 2021 and 2024, from €42.3bn to €62.6bn,” she said.
“Despite large investments in domestic food production, Nigeria imported a total of
US$6.9 billion in 2022, making it one of Africa’s top importers of food.
“With an annual growth rate of 17.6% between 2016 and 2022, Nigeria emerges as the second-largest investor in plastics technology in Africa, with €143m in 2022.”
The main crops grown in Nigeria’s 70.8 million hectares of arable land include rice, millet, yam beans, cassava, guinea corn and maize, according to a report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation.
Despite agriculture’s economic importance, the report stated that Nigeria’s agricultural sector suffers numerous obstacles that lower productivity. These include inadequate land tenure arrangements, a dearth of irrigation farming, soil degradation, and climate change. Others are low technology, high production cost and poor distribution of inputs, limited financing, high post-harvest losses and poor access to markets.
In the meantime, Fairtrade and OTACCWA, the Organisation for Technology Advancement of Cold Chain in West Africa, announced that they would co-organize the 6th West African Cold Chain Summit and Exhibition by OTACCWA alongside Agrofood and Plastprintpack Nigeria 2024, building on their successful partnership since the 2021 event.
The Millers for Nutrition Coalition, or M4N, is a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored program, and TechnoServe is powering the country launch of this initiative, which will also feature the 3rd Annual MFI Awards.
The CEOs of the top five brands in the sugar, edible oil, and wheat flour industries will get prizes from the organizers, who also mentioned that a number of Nigerian ministers, as well as representatives of the Dangote family and the Dangote Foundation, would present the honours.
Also on the menu is a top-level three-day conference with 20+ sessions and 70+ speakers. Bureau Veritas, a company which specializes in testing, inspection and certification services, is the Registration Sponsor of the event.
According to Detjen, more than a hundred elite exhibitors will present products and solutions specifically designed for the Nigerian market. These exhibitors are from Austria, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Ukraine.
