Mr. Godwin Emefiele, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, has outlined the apex bank’s plan to develop a sustainable financing model to boost the production of palm oil.

At a meeting with Governors from the South-East and South-South palm oil producing states, on Monday last week, Emefiele said the Bankers’ Committee has created a special sub-committee to introduce measures to enhance access to capital by smallholders in the palm oil value chain.

The scheme will disburse loans to identified core borrowers, at not more than nine percent interest rate per year, through the CBN’s Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) and Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme (CASC).

Lamenting that Nigeria spends $500 million yearly on importation of palm oil, despite its inclusion in the foreign exchange exclusion list, Mr. Emefiele says: “We intend to support improved production of palm oil to meet not only the domestic needs of the market, but to also increase our exports in order to improve our foreign exchange earnings.”

Noting that in the late 1950s and 1960s, Nigeria was the world’s leading producer and the largest exporter of the product, with 40 per cent market share, Emefiele moans: “Today we are a distant fifth among leading producers of palm oil. We barely produce up to three per cent of the global output with an estimated production of 800,000 MT while countries like Malaysia and Indonesia produce 25 million and 41 million tonnes.”

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