NAFDAC needs to be broken up and given the mandate to concentrate on the regulation and enforcement of standards for drugs and healthcare products only. Food and Agricultural Standards have become a global issue requiring its own standards of quality and safety.

NAFDAC has enough battles to fight and war to wage against sub-standard drugs and healthcare products from India and China and that is why I have been advocating the setting up of the Nigerian Food and Agricultural Standards Authority (NIFASA) for a long time.

When I was working in Tesco UK as Produce Handling Assistance during my student days, I noticed that a lot of green peas and other fresh fruits and vegetables came from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, only a paltry few came from Ghana and Nigeria. I found that even our “garri” was labelled as produce of Pakistan, ostensibly to ensure its entry into UK.

As a student of Agricultural Economics and Management, I was keen to know why, so I did a little research and found that the idea of Good Agricultural Practices from farming to shipping, which is just only recently being talked about in Nigeria, had been in practice in Kenya and these other East African countries for years and this has been noted by the EU.

Nigeria government should merge the Nigerian quarantine service with other related food and agricultural products standards units in SON and NAFDAC to form a new agency called NIFASA, with a clear mandate to ensure global standards of quality and safety in the production, packaging and marketing of food and agricultural commodities in Nigeria.

If we are serious about diversifying our foreign exchange earnings from petroleum and wants acceptability of our food and agricultural products in the EU and other agricultural export target countries, we must take the idea of having this NIFASA body seriously, otherwise our ambition of diversifying export base to focus on Agriculture will remain a mirage.