Poultry Farming: Impact of Land Border Closure on Poultry Production

For about two decades, the import of poultry products into Nigeria has been on the contraband list. But due to the porosity of the land borders and ineffective monitoring, poultry products have always been smuggled into the country to the detriment of local production.

The Federal Government’s recent decision to close the land borders with neighbor  countries through which the products are smuggled is expected to lead to acceleration in the nation’s agricultural value chains. These value chains are several including the supply of inputs, storage, transportation, insurance and many others.

Nigeria has an estimated poultry consuming population of about 200 million, an annual output exceeding 400 million crates of eggs and over 300,000 metric tonnes of meat. There are millions of jobs to be created in the poultry sub-sector ranging from hatcheries, day old chicken production and distribution, layer and broiler chicken rearing, poultry meat production, egg sales, raw material supplies, feed milling etc.

Before the land borders began to become effectively closed, the local poultry industry was in a coma, Nigeria was consuming about 2 million tonnes of poultry meat annually with about 75% imports through smuggling through land borders that were not effectively monitored.

The smuggled products were sold at much lower prices, were of lower quality and preserved with formalin that can cause extensive damage to liver and kidney in the long run. The smuggling adversely affected the local production of poultry products leading to the closure of many poultry farms especially the small farmers.

If the effective closure of the land borders is sustained in the long term, it is expected to drastically reduce to the barest minimum the incidence of smuggling which will significantly accelerate the local production and millions of jobs in the poultry sub-sector.

John Ayodele.