7 in 10 Nigerians are now into agriculture – Candel

The Chairman, Candel Company Limited, Mr. Charles Anudu, stated this in Lagos, Tuesday, during the commissioning of the first ever Nigeria agrochemicals manufacturing plant located at Lekki Free Zone. He stressed the need for the incoming administration to use agriculture to generate foreign revenue. Anudu said: “I think the new government should embrace agriculture. The […]

The Chairman, Candel Company Limited, Mr. Charles Anudu, stated this in Lagos, Tuesday, during the commissioning of the first ever Nigeria agrochemicals manufacturing plant located at Lekki Free Zone.
He stressed the need for the incoming administration to use agriculture to generate foreign revenue.
Anudu said: “I think the new government should embrace agriculture. The drop in oil price is a blessing in disguise. The government should use agriculture to diversify the economy. If you rely on one product for 90per cent of your foreign earnings, if anything happens to that product, you are bound to suffer and if you produce nothing, locally, what then happens is that everything has to be imported, using the scarce foreign exchange to import the goods. The role agriculture plays is that it is a big employer of labour. If the government wants an easier way of creating employment, it is agriculture.”
He said that most of the agrochemical products imported from overseas are inferior, leading poor yields for Nigerian farmers.
Anudu stated that the need to address this problem and save the country from spending huge amonts of money on low quality agrochemicals products informed the decision of his company to invest in the plant.
Crop protection chemicals protect crops from weeds, pests and diseases. 
He said: “We are not going to compete on price but on quality. Any agrochemical products from this plant will be second to none. In Nigeria, there is no company producing agricultural chemicals, this is the first and we are, right from day one, going to ensure international standard. We want to do better than anything made anywhere in the world and imported into Nigeria.”
The Candel chairman said that the facility will provide employment, with over 100 people already working for the firm.
“We are ready to double that number very soon. We have just put in place infrastructure to grow agrochemicals industry in Nigeria.”
Anudu, who complained about the quality of personnel in Nigeria, said that in order to be sure of standard of products at the plant, “we train our staffs and ourselves to make sure that we are world class because we are operating in a global industry and we cannot afford anything that is inferior, we want to stand up to any company whether in Europe, Asia or north America.”
He said that these reasons accounted for why Candel’s agrochemicals products have been welcomed by the farmers.
He said some of the reasons why farmers don’t make profit include the use of inferior technology, seeds and agrochemicals. 
Meanwhile, a member of the Candel’s board of directors, Abubakar Aliyu, has said that the plant will save Nigeria $400million it used to spend, annually, on agrochemicals.
Aliyu explained that water constitutes 50per cent of the volume and weight of any finished agrochemicals product imported into Nigeria. 
Alliyu said: “The plant will also make for production and at better price that means our farmers will get it at cheaper rate. The quality of this plant is assured. The plant is giving agrochemical products to the farmers at good price, and saving the country foreign exchange.”
The factory is configured to produce products specially targeted at small scale farmers as well as customised formulations with different surfactant levels for large scale farmers.
The facility has five process plants for Soluble Liquids (SL), Emulsifiable Concentrates (EC) and Suspension Concentrates (SC) of products from diverse chemical families.