• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Sugar imports down 35% on national master plan, health-consciousness

Sugar imports down 35% on national master plan, health-consciousness

Nigeria’s sugar and sugar confectionery imports declined 35.7 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to Businessday analysis of data from the International Trade Centre, a multilateral agency that serves as a focal point for trade-related technical assistance.

Sugar import reduced by 23 percent to $619.3 million in 2017, from $804.5 million in 2016, and by 16 percent to $519.9 million in 2018.

Analysts say this is as a result of the progress recorded with the Federal Government’s National Sugar Master Plan (NSMP) as well as increasing health-consciousness among Nigerians.

“We have increased our production of sugar through the NSMP, which makes it less necessary to import large quantities of sugar and people are getting more health-conscious of the damage that much sugar can do to their system,” said Emmanuel Ijewere, vice president, Nigerian Agribusiness Group (NABG).

“And also, other substitutes like honey are coming into the market. And if we continue like this, the imports will further go down,” he said.

National Sugar Master Plan is a policy road map for sugar production that was implemented in 2013 with the objective to achieve self-sufficiency in sugar production and, save foreign exchange on the importation of sugar and ethanol, establish 28 factories of varying capacities across the country among others.

The policy provides a five year tax holiday for investors in the country’s sugar value chain, a 10 percent duty, plus a 50 percent levy on imported sugar and a 20 percent, plus a 60 percent levy for imported refined sugar. It is aimed to produce around 1.79 million tonnes of sugar in 2020-23.

Major sugar refineries in Nigeria recently signed the revised edition of the backward integration programme for the sugar sector, according to a sugar forecast document by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released in May 2019.

“Local players in the sugar market are doing backward integration and these players have invested heavily in the backward integration plan, although it has not led us to be fully self-sufficient,” said Abiola Gbemisola, an agriculture analyst at Chapel Hill Denham.

Nigeria’s three main sugar processors – Dangote Group, BUA Sugar Refinery, and Golden Sugar Refinery – are reported to be devoting $334.1 million, $107 million, and $142.4 million, respectively, to expansion.

In 2018, during a chat with journalists after a one-day Northern Region Sugar Sensitisation Workshop organised by National Sugar Development Council (NSDC) in Dutse, Jigawa State, Latif Busari, executive secretary, NSDC, said that Nigeria has attracted N157 billion worth of investment in the five years of the first phase of the NSMP. Also that same year, the council had approved the disbursement of about N3.9 billion out of the N12 billion NSDP fund to boost local sugar production.