National Agricultural Quarantine Service moves to standardise food export
The National Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), which has the mandate to ensure seamless export of Nigerian agro-products, has already started developing exportation templates for some crops.
NAQS said their mandate is also to prevent the introduction, spread of diseases, pest, contaminants of animals, plant, aquatic resources and their products so that we can secure our international trade and also secure the Nigerian economy.
The Director General, Vincent Isigbe said the NAQS ensured that those commodities or those agricultural produce which are going outside Nigeria were of the correct standards and specifications in terms of the international requirements to ensure that these satisfied those standards.
“So, we do backward integration, we inform the critical stakeholders who are the producers, suppliers, the warehouse managers and all the people along the value chain that this is the requirement for the international community for this commodity because these standards or rules keep changing from time to time.
“So, we have set up what we call the export certification value chain where we have set our standard for those commodities in terms of the 5 value chain operators that is the state government, the NAQS, the producers, suppliers and the exporters, so that each and everyone of them know what to do at a particular time along the value chain they operate”, Dr Isigbe noted.
He said the move helped to stabilise the market by ensuring that there are good food safety standards for us to be able to certify and export at the end of the day.
He said for the producers or the farmers, NAQS ensure that if they are going to use any pesticide, they must use a particular type of pesticide and they were educated on how to use it.
“The NAQS has gone further to try and find alternatives to those synthetic pesticides in furtherance of securing the food safety.
“We are working on that, we have a very strong committee, involving the critical stakeholders agencies of government and 3 research departments in the universities, they have joined us and we are working on that alternative bio pesticides so that we will minimally use the synthetic pesticides where these is need to”.
“These are some of the things we are doing as an agency of government within the armbit of our mandate to secure the food security of Nigeria.
“In doing that too by the mere fact that people have opportunity to export, there is now the tendency to increase the level of production and to make food availability better for the nation, it is from that surplus that they will sell some and use some for their own personal use at home”, he added.
