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Oilseed cakes can curb organic livestock shortage in Africa, says Don

By Cornel Essen, Abuja
14 July 2022   |   2:44 am
A member of the International Society for Organic Agriculture Research (ISOFAR), Prof. Victor Olowe, has called on organic livestock producers to embrace oilseed cakes, saying by so doing

A member of the International Society for Organic Agriculture Research (ISOFAR), Prof. Victor Olowe, has called on organic livestock producers to embrace oilseed cakes, saying by so doing, can curb production shortages in Africa.

Olowe said this during his online presentation on the production of oilseed crops and value chain, organised by the Journalists Go Organic Initiative.

The don explained that the major constraint of organic livestock production in African countries is the lack of organic feed, adding that an increase in organic oilseed production and processing could make more feedstuffs available.

He said: “The main area of research interest is agronomy of tropical oilseeds that thrive well across all the vegetation belts in Nigeria, yet the value chain is not utilised.

“Nigeria is currently the second largest producer of soybean in Africa after South Africa, second largest producer of sesame in Africa after Tanzania, and the fourth in the world behind Myanmar, India and Tanzania, yet she still lacks livestock feeds.”

Similarly, Prof. Olowe argued that there is no accurate data on the volume of the total organic oilseeds produced in the country due to the high level of smuggling of vegetable oil across the borders.

He, therefore, stated that most of the sesame seeds going outside the country illegally are voluminous but such exports are not captured by the National Bureau of Statistics, lamenting hawking of roasted sesame, soya beans and groundnuts on the streets.

According to him, Nigeria’s installed yearly soybean crushing capacity is 600,000 tonnes and the crushers are operating at 60 per cent level, resulting in their inability to meet the ever-growing demand for soybean oil and meal for animal feeds.

“The volume of organically produced soybean is less than 0.1 per cent of total world production, while the demand for organic soybean has been increasing gradually in the last decade,’’ he said.

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