Description

Any nation that requires economic development must look inwards to identify areas where it has comparative advantage over other nations and seek to develop the identified areas.

Apart from hydrocarbon, Nigeria has comparative in the Agricultural sector where a variety of products are produced due to the favorable climatic condition ,good soil condition and the fact that over 70% of the entire land mass of the country is arable.

Nigeria has comparative advantage in the production and export of sesame seed in Africa over her counterparts due to the large arable land available for production and the conducive climatic condition. The nations presently controls about 4% of the world market export products worth $20mn in a global trade in sesame seed valued at $480mn.

Sesame seed is in great demand and at Foraminifera Market Research we seek to expose the opportunity available in the supply of the commodity to local industries in Nigeria through this report.

Because of the high quality of sesame oil compared to oils gotten from other oil bearing seeds, the demand for sesame seed has been on the increase for the past 10 years.

The total sesame seed export is worth $ 480 m and is growing at the rate of 3% on a annual basis. There is demand for the product from both processors and exporters.

The market for palm and edible oil is national. With a population of over one hundred and sixty five {165,000,000} million people and an estimated national population growth rate of 5.7% per annum ,an average economic growth rate of 3.5% per annum in the past five {5} years, Nigeria has a large market for edible oil.

In 2005, in order to stimulate local production and attain self sufficiency in edible oil production, the government introduced the presidential initiative on the development of edible oil over a period not exceeding three {3} years. Under this initiative, attention was focused on the promotion of eleven scheduled oil seed crops which are oil palm seed, groundnut seed, Soya beans seed, cotton seed etc and production target was set for each of the crops under the programme as follow

1. Oil Palm: 1 million hectares capacity of producing 15 million fresh fruit bunches
2. Groundnut: 15 million tones annually
3. Soya beans: 670,000 1 million tones per annum
4. Seed Cotton: 1 million tones over the plan period

After five {5} years of the initiative, the domestic edible oil demand far exceeds the national production. The short fall in supply being estimated at about 50,000 tones per year. From the above figures, it is clear that there is a large and sustainable market for edible oil in Nigeria, hence groundnut seed.

Sesame seed is an important source of high quality and inexpensive protein and oil. With an average oil content of 40%- 55% have one of the highest oil content in oil bearing seeds.

The return on investment on the supply of sesame seeds to local industries is estimated between 10%- 15%.