The Plantation Owners Forum of Nigeria (POFON) has decried what they described as orchestrated and clandestine move of certain industrialists to pressure the Federal government to remove the existing tariff of 35% on the importation of crude palm oil (CPO) into the country.

The move, which they said is coming a few years after similar pressure was mounted to lift the ban on the importation of palm oil into Nigeria, was being aided by the Technical Committee on Tariff and Trade in the Federal Ministry of Finance.

Fatai A. Afolabi, Executive Secretary of the body, noted that this new move has revealed the grand design to cripple the country’s oil palm industry.

“From the time the ban was lifted in 2009 and now, Nigeria has diminished in its position from number three to number five position in the World production of palm oil having been overtaken by Thailand and Columbia.”

He explained that it is only in Nigeria’s oil palm industry that secondary producers and end users cannot show evidence or model for commodity value chain linkages. “They must insist on importing palm oil because it is cheaper in Malaysia and Indonesia. It is also a way of siphoning our scarce foreign exchange.”

While noting the impending doom that the reduction or removal of the tariff portends for the oil palm sector, POFON said the country’s rural economy will be dealt a devastating blow, as Nigeria’s oil palm industry is just recovering from the shock and negative effects of the ban that was lifted in 2009.

They added that oil palm planting, especially smallholdings, has gone beyond the traditional oil palm belt and has spread to other states in central Nigeria and parts of the north.

Afolabi posited that the dumping of cheap and unfortified palm oil in Nigeria also has implication for the oil palm component of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) of the present administration.

“The proposed tariff review will ultimately open a floodgate to CPO imports, the debilitating effect of which Nigeria may not recover from. This may be likened to the imports of refined petroleum products that started as a short-gap measure but has been perpetuated.

“The imports of CPO directly create more employment for Malaysia and corresponding loss of jobs for Nigeria especially in the current situation where unemployment has led to security crisis in our Country.”