Lagos, May 21, 2023 – The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has called for more collaboration among government agencies at the Nigerian ports to stem the rejection of Nigerian food exports abroad.
Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director-General of NAFDAC, said that more than 70 per cent of Nigeria’s food exports were being rejected abroad due to poor and substandard grades.
Adeyeye said this at the inauguration of a new office complex of NAFDAC at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos.
According to a statement by the Resident Media Consultant to NAFDAC, Sayo Akintola, on Sunday, Adeyeye said rejection of Nigerian foods exports to countries in European and the United States would stop with more collaboration among government agencies at the ports.
Adeyeye said the deplorable state of export trade facilitation for regulated products leaving the country had continued to be a cause for serious concern for the agency.
According to her, this raises the need for a more enhanced regulation of export – packaging, pre-shipment testing and certification to provide some quality assurance and to minimize rejects.
To save our national reputation in the international commerce, Prof Adeyeye called on all stakeholders in the export trade to see this as a call to duty and collaborate with NAFDAC for the sake of country and our collective future.
She said that a trip to NAFDAC Export warehouses within the international airports would explain the major reason for the continuous rejection of Nigerian exports abroad.
The NAFDAC boss said the agency was responding to the challenge by collaborating with other agencies at the ports to ensure that by that Nigerian exports met the regulatory requirements of the importing countries and destinations.
‘’The mandate to safeguard the health of the populace through ensuring that food, medicines, cosmetics, medical devices, chemicals, and packaged water are safe, efficacious, and of the right quality in an economy that is overwhelmingly dependent on the importation of the bulk of its finished products and raw materials could never have been actualised without the effective presence of NAFDAC at the ports and land borders,’’ she said.
‘’Without customs, we will not be able to do a lot of what we have been able to do.
“The collaboration between Customs and NAFDAC is huge.
“NAFDAC is a complex organisation. We are scientific. We are police and we work with the Department of State Services. We work with Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of the few unscrupulous stakeholders.
“NAFDAC collaborates with Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Services to ensure that due diligence is done because over 70 per cent of the products that leave our ports get rejected.
“Considering the money spent on getting those products out of the country, it is a double loss for both the exporter and the country.
‘’Without the police, we cannot do much in terms of investigation and enforcement. We have over 80 policemen with us in NAFDAC. They help us a lot when we are doing raids or investigations as the case may be’’.
In pursuit of its mandate, she further explained that the Agency has embarked on the optimization and customization of its processes, stating that the Ports Inspection Data-Capture and Risk Management System (PIDCARMS) is presently deployed in all of the nation’s ports and land borders to automatically capture and process data for imported regulated products from the Nigeria Customs Information System (NICIS).
The DG said the Agency is also working assiduously with relevant stakeholders towards implementation of Traceability for pharmaceuticals in Nigeria, recalling that a Traceability Pilot was conducted successfully for COVID-19 Vaccines distribution and a scale-up is being done as soon as feasible, for medicines and other regulated products.
‘’The Traceability Information System was developed from PIDCARMS, which underscores the integrative system of NAFDAC. These efforts will further boost our regulatory oversight in monitoring the importation and distribution of medicines to ensure that spurious, substandard, and falsified (fake and counterfeit) products are minimized and are eventually blocked out from our supply chain.
‘’Similarly, our Post-marketing Surveillance initiatives that involve the Ports Inspection Directorate are gaining global recognition, and we intend to do much more for our nation, especially for future generations’’, she said.
She said that the Agency has extended the frontiers of the fight against substandard products through the procurement of more Truscan devices to further boost on-spot checks for quality of products at the ports, shops, market spaces and anywhere else.
She said these efforts have paid off as NAFDAC has recently been recognized as a world class regulator, with the conferment of the WHO ML3 Status and with continuous improvement of our processes and procedures progressing towards becoming a WHO Listed regulatory Authority (WLA) status to the satisfaction of our customers.
In a bid to deliver on its mandate in spite of the various challenges, she said ‘’we have spent the last few years of my first tenure in the onerous task of building new and upgrading obsolete infrastructure to make them befit to our status, and to provide a safe and comfortable working environment for our staff for maximum output’’. (GBN)
