Good news for Jigawa Hibiscus farmers as I was officially informed by Nigerian Quarantine that the ban on Nigeria’s Hibiscus (Zobo) by Mexico, our major buyer has been lifted and the 1st set of containers shipped under the new arrangement had been offloaded without incident.
The ban had been in place since 2017 and it was a long and difficult struggle to resolve the issue which involved high level diplomatic and bilateral discussions spearheaded by Jigawa State under the auspices of the the Jigawa Investment Promotion Agency on behalf of its over 15,000 hibiscus farmers, accounting for 85% of local production.
The Jigawa Governor played a significant role in his capacity as the Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Zero Oil Export and we had several meetings to resolve issues with multiple export associations who were working at cross purposes and eventually ended up in court.
After resuming in the senate providence landed me in the Agriculture, industry and Health committees, and to a large extent this helped in resolving the interagency rivalry between the Nigerian Quarantine service under the Ministry of Agriculture and the Federal Produce inspection Service under the Ministry of Trade & industry which both laid claim to regulating the product at point of export.
After resolving the oversight issues and agreeing on a framework with SAGAPA, the Mexican equivalent of Quarantine Services, NAFDAC promptly declared a ban on methyl bromide, the agreed pesticide to be used under the framework, and it took high level intervention to reach a compromise.
While the Ban was in place the Jigawa State Government organized the hibiscus farmers and developed a database of their location, farm size and contact, and held several stakeholder meetings to intimate them of best practices to avoid the trogoderma infestation that led to the ban. The minster of state Trade & Industry was kind enough to arrange a global gaps training for them in that respect.
Hopefully they’re better placed now to take full advantage of the export resumption and reap the additional benefits of the backward integration agreements reached between the state and hibiscus exporters.
Hadejia is a Senator from Jigawa State
