Experts harp on research to boost palm oil sector revenue
Some agriculture experts have called for the resuscitation of the palm oil sector through research and technology to upscale its numerous value chains to boost revenue generation.
The experts made the call in separate interviews with the news men on Thursday in Lagos.
They stressed the need to improve the value-chain of the cash crop to boost revenue generation of the sector.
An agriculture analyst, Mr Omotunde Banjoko, called for investment in research and technology to discover more value chains of oil palm.
“We can get a lot from the oil palm as a cash crop beyond the edible part of it.
“The exploration of the oil palm value chain can be possible through research. We can discover through research what we can get even from the leaves, the trunk, the kernels and all other parts.
“Like we have seen in crops like cocoa, where besides getting chocolate, there is cocoa butter, from which we derive cocoa cream and several products.
“So, it is not just the chocolate that people consume. They have been able to produce cosmetics from cocoa.
“The same thing applies to oil palm, beyond the edible palm oil, due to several research efforts, carotene, the palm kernel cake, and several other by-products that are used in both pharmaceutical and food industry have been discovered,” Banjoko said.
He said the Federal Government must be willing to fund research to expand and utilise the value chain of the oil palm.
“There are so many other products that have been discovered through technology and research in the oil palm value chain in other developed climes, so, we need to tap into this,” he said.
On his part, Mr Akin Alabi, an agriculture expert and co-founder Corporate Farmers International, said productivity goes beyond holding the top spot in oil palm production without improving its value-chain.
“Nigeria still maintains top spot in oil palm production in Africa. Nigeria produces about 1.6 metric tonnes of oil palm annually which makes us a high producer compared to other African countries.
“Our high level of production implies that there is a wide range of value chain that can be derived from the oil palm production.
“The most popular derivative from the oil palm trade is the red oil which is used both domestically and for commercial purposes.
“The red palm oil is in high demand for domestic cooking, it is also used commercially in the production of soaps and detergents.
“While we are quite big in the production of the red palm oil, we need to also explore the processing part of it.
“We also have the palm oil cake which is a derivative from the kernel and is used to produce feeds for animal farming and other value chains,” Alabi said.
He noted that some Nigerian industries had been grown exponentially by leveraging the oil palm sector.
“There are a lot of untapped value chains in the palm oil sector that we need to go into in order to increase the revenue generation from this sector,” Alabi said.
