…begs NADF, NALDA, NASC for interventions

By Gabriel Ewepu

ABUJA – AS non-export commodities are gaining attention, the National Cashew Association of Nigeria, NCAN, yesterday, disclosed over 120,000 cashew seedlings currently being produced for distribution to farmers to boost cashew exports.

Speaking with Vanguard, the National President, NCAN, Dr Ojo Ajanaku, said the cashew seedling is the natural variety, also called the Ogbomosho or Oyo State variety, which has a premium price, hence to be a uniform variety farmers will be cultivating.

According to Ajanaku, when the variety gets to a full-grown cashew tree by three years and it begins to bear fruits, which is globally sort for, which also processors and farmers highly demand for it, because of the high export value it has.

He said: “We are in about seven states now, where we are doing the seedling production to be distributed to our farmers.

“in Benue State, we have done 20,000; Kogi State 20,000; Edo State 40,000; Kwara State 20,000; Oyo State 30,000; Enugu State 50,000.

“But we got a collaboration from Beyond Farming Collective, they supported us with about 45,000 seedling production.

“We have done about 120,000 currently, and we are going to produce 300,000 cashew seedlings that we are going to distribute around.”

Meanwhile, he said no funding from anywhere but they have strategized to actualize the production of the 300,000 cashew seedling production.

“And how are we able to make this happen? We are able to source the money from the ticketing that we are doing, that is the National Cash Association of Nigeria collects tokens from our members who are transporting their cashew to export zones or to processors’ factories.
We take a little amount of money from them.

“Those money we have put together to boost this nursery production in the country, so that at least we can get back to our farmers.”

He also expressed optimism that with the determination and target of 300,000 cashew seedling production, “it is possible for us to push it to 2 million metric tonnes annually because if we are able to do 2 million metric tonnes annually, we believe that it will give Nigeria a lot of foreign earnings, knowing that cashew is majorly an export commodity because it is not much consumed in Nigeria because of its competition with the groundnuts in Nigeria.”

However, the NCAN boss appealed to government interventionist agencies including the National Agricultural Development Fund, NADF, National Agricultural Lands Development Authority, NALDA, and National Agricultural Seed Council, NASC, to help them harness the massive potential of the cashew subsector towards boosting the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and increasing generation of foreign exchange for the country including job creation for millions of Nigerians.

“We have written to them for a possibility where we can present to them what we want them to do for us but unfortunately, we have not gotten a response from any of them to invite us for presentation.

“And we are using this medium to reach out to them in order for us to present our scorecard to them, and where we want them to give us assistance for us to be able to boost cashew production in Nigeria because we have the land, out of about 54 million hectares of land we have in Nigeria, how many of these have been farmed, and how many we are wasting?

“We have so much forest, and that is why we have criminals everywhere, because they have places to hide but if we convert those places to farmlands, the criminals will not have a hiding place, and cashew is one of the best commodities, I think, that can easily be spread across the nation”, he said.