ABUJA: Nigeria can generate 4.5 billion dollars annually from cashew exportation, Mr Olusegun Awolowo, Executive Director, Nigerian Export Promotion Council, has said. Awolowo announced this in a statement by Mr Joe Itah, Head, Corporate Communications of the council, in Abuja on Tuesday. The executive director ,who said this at a facility visit to the Valency Cashew Processing Limited, urged the company to sustain its production capacity and focus more on value-addition for the product.
“In view (of the need) to scale up production and processing of cashew for exports for more foreign exchange for the country, I implore the company to pay attention to quality standard and value-addition of cashew for exports. “This is because the commodity commands a global export value of over 4.5 billion dollars annually, which Nigeria should aim to grab a fair market share,’’ Awolowo said. He said the visit was to identify areas of intervention on ways to develop and promote cashew as a major export product of the Commodity Export Company at Ibafo, Ogun. Awolowo urged the management of the company to support the growth of commodity exports by ramping up production of cashew. He said that as at 2015, Nigeria produced a mere 160,000 tonnes of the nuts worth 253 million dollars for exports.
According to him, currently the larger quantity of the production capacity is Raw Cashew Nuts (RCN) whereas processing even 50 per cent of same volume will create about 9,000 jobs. Awolowo explained that cashew was one of the 13 National Strategic Export Products chosen by Federal Government under Category B of Zero Oil Plan.
