7 November 2008
Export Path, a consortiums of several organisations Vertical Optimisation, Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC), the Nigerian Embassy in Washington DC, US Department of Commerce, NEXIM Bank, and Diamond Bank, has began the process of training Nigerian exporters to enable them access to the United States market and reap some benefits under the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA).
The agency provides exporters with three things, viz: It helps them develop products that can sell in the US. "We provide them financing to manufacture the product and help them sell it. That is what Export Path does," according to Emeka Nwankwo, who is coordinating the training.
Nwankwo said that the experience that "I am bringing to Export Path actually bears from what I have done as an exporter running Aquada Development Corporation; what I was asked to do was: You have done this for yourself, help other people do it. Our success in this was that what are the barriers to the US market for the Nigerian-based businesses and how can we help them to alleviate the barriers."
He explained that by enabling them access to the US market, "they can get their products in on a reduced tariff or no tariff paid to the US market because there is no point shipping products nobody is going to buy on a duty free basis, so helping them to know the products they can sell in the US market is the first step to take advantage of AGOA and helping them to sell the products is how they actually realise the benefits of AGOA."
The cost of gari is artificially low because Nigerian farmers do not make gari as a product for sale. They are actually subsistence farmers - they cultivate the cassava and process the gari for their own use and the excess which they have they sell. Nigerian farmers are actually subsidising the supply of gari by keeping the price outrageously low.
But in Nigeria every industrial application of cassava competes with cassava as a food source, which means that the availability of cassava is low, and the cost is relatively high compared to products obtained from the same source. If you try to build a large industrial process based on cassava, it is going to disrupt the food chain. Nigeria should not pretend that it could run large industrial concerns with cassava.
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