Nigeria loses $362.5m yearly to dried beans ban

Nigeria is losing about $362.5m yearly, in terms of foreign exchange, to the ban on exportation of dried beans by the European Union (EU) in the last eight years. 
 
The Director General, Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), Dr. Vincent Isegbe, who revealed this in Abuja at the inauguration of members of the Standing Committee on Agro Zero Initiative, said Nigeria was the largest producer of dried cowpea in the world, accounting for almost half of the global production.
 
He, however, noted that Nigeria was not among the top 10 leading exporters of dried cowpea in the world. 
 
Recall that the EU, in January 2013, placed a temporary suspension of imports of dried beans from Nigeria for one year, due to the excessive use of chemicals by Nigerian farmers to control a pest, Maruca vitrata, from damaging crops on the field. The ban was later extended to 2022.
 

He mentioned that the results of the extensive fieldwork and laboratory analyses done by NAQS showed that the challenge of high pesticide residue in Nigerian beans was not nested in the farm.

He reported that the bean samples collected from the farms had low pesticide residues –beneath the maximum residue level (MRL) of Nigeria’s trading partners –while bean samples collected from the warehouses had high pesticide residues, above the MRL.