NEPC trains 500 people on food processing, packaging, labelling for export

NIGERIA’S EXPORT AGEN CY, THE EX PORT PROMO TIONS COUNCIL (NEPC) last week in Calabar, Cross River State, held a threeday training for some 500 persons in the state, on food processing, packaging and labelling for export.

It said the training was part of its continued efforts in boosting grassroots participation in the non-oil export development processes.

Cross River is majorly an agric-based state, with vast quantities of cocoa, tuber crops like yams, cassava, potatoes, as well as rice, sorghum, millet, banana, among others.

The state has a gross domestic product economy of $12.260 billion, placing 11th in a 2016 Nigeria’s state of the states’ rakings.

Segun Awolowo, NEPC executive director, represented by Veronica Oriere, deputy director in charge of export, opened the export training for the participants. He said NEPC was committed to fulfil Federal Government’s aggressive development of the nonoil sector of the economy.

He said the training was in partnership with critical stakeholders, the ministry of Commerce and Industry and the private sector to generate foreign exchange for the state and country.

“We need to export our excess food. I commend some states like Anambra and Ebonyi, for exporting rice and vegetables. This packaging and labelling is very critical in processing the agriculture value chain,” the NEPC executive director said.

Emmanuel Etim, Trade Promotion Adviser, NEPC, Calabar said that the agency believes that a growth in nonoil exports activities would lead to increase in foreign exchange earnings, create jobs, grow the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), promote industrialization, especially as the country was beginning to think of an era of zero oil in the National Economic Development Plan (NEDP).

He said the export capacity building workshop on food, processing, packaging and labelling for export, in collaboration with the Cross River State Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which held at the Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDC) Calabar was deliberate and strategic.

He said the training was carefully designed to build the capacities of relevant stakeholders in Cross River on practical food processing, packaging and labelling for export, geared towards achieving economic dependency through meaningful non-oil activities.

He stressed that packaging and labelling was quite critical in processing the agriculture value chain.

Azuka Ikejiofor, the SouthSouth regional coordinator, NEPC, informed that in 2015, Nigeria’s non-oil export products suffered a colossal humiliation in the inglorious beans, fish, melon and sesame seed export saga at the European markets.

She said that monumental loss could have been averted if adequate and conscious control checks and sanitary measures were carried out within the products value chain points. Consequently, and till date, the woeful outcome of those transactions had persistently refused to diffuse.

For Anthony Aneji, Cross River commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources, the state government was committed to the diversification of the state’s economy through agriculture and other value chain.