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The Non-oil export industry in Nigeria
is a latent gold waiting to be explored. The potential of this industry at
present is still largely untapped. The major players in the commodity export
business in Nigeria are the Asians, while the small and medium scale exporters
are largely Nigerians.
The data obtained via from the quarterly
report of the Central Bank of Nigeria 2009 to 2012 revealed that the non-oil
export industry in Nigeria is currently growing at an average rate of about 23%
annually. According to this data, the average volume of all the exported items
comes to about $2.5 Billion annually.
It is also
worthy of note to realize that Nigeria mainly exports commodities and
unfinished goods with Agricultural commodities being the major item of export
and taking up more than 20% of the total items exported. However, we have not
fully utilized our capacity for Agricultural production. This is because, In Nigeria today, more than 70% of Nigerian farmers
are peasant farmers, the Nigerian Agricultural Post-Harvest losses have been
put at 30-50% of the total farm produce yearly by the Food and Agricultural
Organisation (FAO) and less than 40% of our arable land is under cultivation.
All these short comings go a long way to tell us that there is still a very
large room for improvement.
Another sector where we have great potential to
increase our output as a nation is the solid mineral sector. Although Nigeria
has billions of tonnes in deposit of different exportable solid minerals,
however, less than 100,000 tonnes are being exported annually and this is
contributing less than 10% of the annual volume of items exported out of
Nigeria.
The contributions of the other sectors including
manufacturing is just about 10% also and most of our finished goods are mainly
exported to West African countries. Very few go to Europe and America. This is
probably due to the fact that very few companies are able to meet the standards
set by these nations.
