Over 70% of Nigerian food exports, according to Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, are rejected abroad.
Adeyeye made this statement at the inauguration of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport/NAHCO’s New NAFDAC Office Complex in Lagos.
Adeyeye claimed that if cooperation between the agency and other government agencies at the ports is strengthened, the incidence of food exports from Nigeria being rejected in some European and American countries may soon become a thing of the past. This was stated in a statement by Sayo Akintola, the Resident Media Consultant to NAFDAC, on Sunday.
According to Adeyeye, the terrible situation of export trade facilitation for regulated goods leaving the country has persisted.
Her words: “The mandate to safeguard the health of the populace through ensuring that food, medicines, cosmetics, medical devices, chemicals, and packaged water are safe, efficacious, and of the right quality in an economy that is overwhelmingly dependent on the importation of the bulk of its finished products and raw materials could never have been actualised without the effective presence of NAFDAC at the ports and land borders.”
Commending the Nigeria Customs Service, she added: ‘’Without Customs, we will not be able to do a lot of what we have been able to do. The collaboration between Customs and NAFDAC is huge. NAFDAC is a complex organisation. We are scientific. We are police and we work with the Department of State Services. We work with Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of the few unscrupulous stakeholders.
“NAFDAC collaborates with Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Services to ensure that due diligence is done because over 70 per cent of the products that leave our ports get rejected. Considering the money spent on getting those products out of the country, it is a double loss for both the exporter and the country.
“Without the police, we cannot do much in terms of investigation and enforcement. We have over 80 policemen with us in NAFDAC. They help us a lot when we are doing raids or investigations as the case may be.”
