CBN, NSDC Mull Special Funding for Sugar Industry

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is currently collaborating with the National Sugar Development Council (NSDC) to provide special funding support to the sugar sector.

The aim is to fastrack the realisation of the national sugar development master plan.

This was disclosed by newly appointed Executive Secretary, National Sugar Development Council (NSDC), Mr. Zacch Adedeji, during an interaction with journalists in Abuja.

He pointed out that issues of funding, land access and community hostility, ports congestion, human capital among others currently posed a threat to the realisation of the country’s target towards self-sufficiency in local sugar production. However, in a determined effort to resolve the land access problem, Adedeji said the council, working with other stakeholders, planned to organise a forum with state governors in the sugar producing belt adding that the state chief executives remained critical to a peaceful resolution of land related challenges.

In the area of funding, he said: ”We’ve worked in the last few days with the CBN in making establishing the kind of funding structure that we want to put in place to resolve all these funding issues that we have.

“And they (CBN) are helping us and collaborating well to make sure that all the funding requirements that we need is met through special intervention in CBN.”

According to him, sugar production remained both technical and capital intensive with long gestation period.

He said: “The kind of funding that is required to actually develop the sugar estate is not what we use 23 per cent interest facility to produce. So, it requires special intervention to actually do.”

On land access, he point out that to achieve self-sufficiency in sugar and to produce 1.7 million metric tons which is the estimated domestic consumption, the country needed a minimum of 238,000 hectares of land.

He said: “There is no way we won’t be consuming villages in our sugar belt and you know the implications of taking over peoples’ lands - the ancestral attachment that people have to the land.

“It is our intention to have a forum of sugar producing states because by the land use act, you know that all the land in the country resides in the governors

“We need the collaboration of governors of all these sugar producing belts to come together and help us resolve the problem of land and community hostility.”