Agrofood conference to address post- harvest losses
STILL basking in the euphoria of the success recorded in the 2023 edition of the Nigeria Agrofood and plastprint pack conference, the 2024 edition has been fixed for March 26 to 28, 2024 at the landmark centre, Victoria Island, Lagos.
According to the organisers, the yearly conference is a good way to grow the economy by addressing the issue of post- harvest losses, which has being a major challenge to the agric sector.
The President of the Organisation for Technology Advancement of Cold Chain in West Africa ( OTACCWA), Mr Alexander Isiong, said the conference can improve the country’s agriculture, adding that to add value to the country’s produce, farmers should be able to add value.
“To add value, you should be able to process what you produce and in processing it, you need to be able to carry it into a cold chain environment. What the cold chain environment does is for the safety and food standard. Apart from even creating food for Nigeria, what we are trying to do on the ecosystem is to make Nigeria to be able to export produce.
“The reason for the increase in dollar is that Nigeria spends more than it earns internationally. The only place that we get foreign exchange now is through crude oil and fossil fuel. The only avenue the Federal Government can make money from is to create foreign in- flow through agriculture and you can do that by getting certification for farms, to get certification for the process of taking the food from the farm, up on to the way to the airport for it to go out of the country.
“The reason why Nigeria cannot benefit from all this is because all Nigeria products are not certified outside the country, so we cannot export. What we are doing in OTACCWA have being to sensitise the government on the fact that they are actually losing a lot of money by not keyi n g i n t o what c o l d chain is all about,” he said.