Editorial

CBN’s ban on milk importation, commendable

 

Merely looking at the number of cattle roaming around the country, the assumption will be that we will get enough milk from the trade.
However, over time it has been proven that not just that we do not have enough, the milk we get from domestic sources does not meet 15 percent of our national needs. Consequently, we simply rear cattle for meat consumption even that is with a lot of blood, tears and sorrow. Other derivatives of the cattle are even less explored. The skin, the bones and the hoofs are almost never used for what will create more jobs, improve foreign exchange earnings and enrich our people. There is unpardonable wastage in the value chain. Milk suffers the most as stories abound on how cattle owners simply waste it. Fresh milk is a big deal in other parts of the world, but not here. Pity!
Wastage is not peculiar to milk products. The same can be said of other agricultural (crop and livestock) products that waste when in season. We have not even broached goat milk and or plant milk that abound or can be grown in our country. Crop wastage is a generational problem, no need to try to explain it because it is annoying. It is from this perspective that one will begin to appreciate the thinking behind what the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), is planning to do with the envisaged policy of denying importers of milk foreign exchange from the official window. The amount the country spends importing milk is unreasonably high. That policy, soon to come into place, was one of the decisions arrived at during the most recent Monetary Policy Committee, MPC meeting.
The argument behind the envisaged policy makes an unassailable case for investments in local milk production. From our investigation, the apex bank is not planning to undermine anyone’s business interests. It is not about to develop challenges that will hamstring the operations of those in the milk business. They are just trying to create opportunities for those businesses to expand and grow and also actualise their full potentials of contributing their quota to government’s plan to develop a sustainable industrial base that will create jobs and contribute to the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
Emefiele explained this much to importers when he admonished them to support the pastoralists, get them concentrated in one place instead of moving around. Provide them with facilities like water, hospitals, and schools. The farmers can acquire land and begin to graze their own cows and fatten them and get the milk, and then they can also be complemented by pastoralists who own their own small holder cows under a small farming holder arrangement, they can also get milk from them. In the long run, the proceeds of what they will get in return will be the milk they will sell to recoup their investments. But typical of Nigerian businessmen and their foreign collaborators, they are used to easy ways of investing little and raking in huge gains through importation of finished goods, the policy is beginning to be considered as a threat to the economy.
Just like what happened when the policy that excluded 43 items from official forex window, this one, too, is encountering a barrage of criticisms aimed at scuttling it before it has the chance of being tested. Undeterred, the CBN has made it clear that the subsisting practices were not sustainable and will not be encouraged to continue to be a drain on the nation’s foreign exchange. The bank has explained that there is no plan to ban the importation of milk. Of course that will be ill-advised as the nation is yet to attain self-sufficiency in local production. What the policy envisages is that businesses that must import milk, just have to look for other sources for their foreign exchange requirements outside the CBN.
We are hopeful that this policy can succeed. By encouraging smallholder pastoralists to own their own cattle and be settled in a place, this will boost the economy in no small measure. We urge Nigerians to take advantage of this policy since the CBN is ready to fund it. State governments should rally their residents to partake in this venture. If properly done, the milk industry which is a $1.5-2billion annual industry and growing is capable of employing hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in the next five to ten years. The policy is in order.

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