By Taiwo FAROTIMI

THE postponement of the deadline for the enforcement of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) comes as a relief to Nigeria and other affected countries. However, not a few cocoa farmers in Nigeria are still in panic mode.

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Had the European Union (EU) stuck to its deadline to enforce its European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), initially fixed for December 30, 2024, a deadly blow would have been dealt cocoa farmers in the country who export the product.

Countries exporting cocoa, coffee, soya bean, oil palm, cattle, rubber and wood to the EU member-nations had been gripped by fear following the law, which was ratified by the European parliament in June last year.

In Nigeria, the authorities had come under intense pressure and criticisms for being lackadaisical about meeting the conditions so that the products exported by the country do not face rejection in the international market. Letters of appeal were written to the EU Commission by the National Cocoa Management Committee (NCMC) and Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria (CFAN) on the need to review the regulations and shift the deadline.

This is even as the NCMC was given a mandate to rally stakeholders towards ensuring that the European market, which takes about 80 per cent of Nigeria’s cocoa, is not lost.

The frantic efforts culminated in the launching of a national task-force by the minister of agriculture and food security, Abubakar Kyari, in Abuja on October 8, 2024. However, six days before the launch in Abuja, the EU, in a document signed on October 2, 2024, proposed a shift in the deadline.

Although it is yet to be formally ratified by the European Parliament, the proposal, which has been approved by the European Council, comes as a great relief to affected countries and their farmers, especially Nigeria.

The EUDR resolution

The EU had passed a resolution known as the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), in June 2023, giving 18-month notice to all countries exporting seven categories of agricultural produce to EU-member nations that failure to address the issues of deforestation in the farms, as well as undertake a survey of the land and the farmers would attract a ban of the export of the affected commodities to Europe.

Farmers of the affected agricultural products: cattle, wood, oil palm, rubber, soya, cocoa and coffee, majority of who were ignorant of the law, particularly cocoa farmers, continued to work tirelessly to meet the projection of the federal government on cocoa production by 2025.

The resolution, which was communicated to the authorities in Nigeria, as was done for other affected countries, stipulated a deadline of December 31, 2024.

Cocoa farmers in the dark about EU regulation

Prior to the happy turn of events, observing a seeming lack of concerted approach by the federal government to deal with the matter, many farmers, particularly in the southern part of Nigeria, expressed frustration towards the regulation.

Interestingly, many farmers were even unaware of the regulation that would have seriously impacted their business and income, as they were planning harvests in some cases.

For instance, in mid-August, while the authorities in the country were in panic that the EU was about to drop the hammer on the cocoa industry, Charles Mgbe, a pastor and cocoa farmer in Ikom, Cross River State, oblivious of the threat on his produce, was already making plans for the harvests at the end of the year. The sales in previous years had brought celebration to the clan, and the signs this time, looked even brighter. He was one of the cocoa farmers in the area who were expecting to start the new year swimming in cocoa money.

He said, “This is farming season, and farmers are spraying now for the pods to come out so that by September, October, we will start harvesting.”

That excitement was driven by the development that saw Ikom, as a fast-growing hub of the cocoa business in Cross River State, as a result of which it had witnessed the proliferation of cocoa warehouses, and played host to exporters even with over 20 of them locally based.

In view of the fortune in the trade, more and more young people were getting involved, while the old farmers were happy making up for the losses in the past years. Individuals, family and government farms were being revived, while investors, both within Nigeria and abroad, opened shops in Ikom to receive the crop, bag and export the product.

The same was the case in Bendeghe, in the Etung LGA, another cluster of cocoa farming in the state. A lot of farmers went about drying cocoa beans in the open without much knowledge about the threat from the EU, to ban importation of their crops beginning from January 2025.

A farmer from Akwa Ibom State, Umanah Umanah, who said he worked for a trader, expressed shock when he was told of the EU regulation. He confessed that he had no prior knowledge of the threat.

In Delta State also, farmers were in the dark on what the EU regulation means.

A chief and a cocoa farmer in Nsukwa, Aniocha South LGA, who has a 30-hectare farmland,Tony Okofu, said though he had read it in the newspapers, he did not understand the import of the EU’s regulation.

I read it, but didn’t understand what it meant. I read something about deforestation and that they are not going to buy from countries not keeping the rules. I didn’t understand it until you just spoke about it now. I don’t know the number of trees that they think should not be in a farm.  You have seen trees in my farm. I don’t know what they (EU) actually want.

He said, “I read it, but didn’t understand what it meant. I read something about deforestation and that they are not going to buy from countries not keeping the rules. I didn’t understand it until you just spoke about it now. I don’t know the number of trees that they think should not be in a farm.You have seen trees in my farm. I don’t know what they (EU) actually want.”

Even though cocoa is not considered a major export crop in Delta State, the head of the Nigeria Export Promotion Council (NEPC), Florence Amukwa, in the state, said her council tries its best possible to sensitise farmers on the right thing to do before they could export their products.

She said, “We also go to them to see what they are doing on their farms. At times we invite experts who also give them knowledge on how they should go about it.”

Though there is an appreciable investment in cocoa, the agricultural products known for export in the state are cassava, oil palm and, to some extent, rubber. The contribution of Delta state to exportation of cocoa and rubber has dropped significantly over the years.

Findings show that many rubber plantations that previously dotted the central senatorial zone are giving way to residential habitations and food crop farms. Cassava, used in processing garri, is a staple food in the state that has joined export crops and its by-products are exported.

Though rubber fetched Nigeria a whopping $84 million dollars in 2022, while Nigeria is ranked 18^th exporter in the world, the product lost its prime place as Nigeria’s 4^th most valuable export in the 1960s and early 1970s to occupy the 22^nd position among export products in the country in 2023.

In the case of cocoa, even at the national level, the highest production volume is said to be at 350,000 tonnes, the volume produced in the 1970s by the country. Nigeria’s ranking in cocoa has also dropped to the sixth in the world. But now that things are, once again, looking up for stakeholders in the industry, there is the likelihood that more people will begin to take interest in it, as it happens in other cocoa producing states.

With increasing gains from the exportation of cash crops in the state, particularly oil palm, individuals and corporate farmers have continued to expand plantations into forest reserves, and this has given both the ministry of environment officials, and people fighting for the protection of the environment, serious concern.

That is where the EU’s regulation on cocoa, and other products, strikes a chord.

An official of the environment ministry said that the threat issued by the EU to restrict import of cash crops from Nigeria was a welcome development. The official, who did not want his name in print because he was not authorised to speak for the ministry, said the measure would at least make some of the violators come to change their ways and help the work of the ministry.

Delta State has vast oil palm plantations covering about 100,000 hectares of land. The major estates are owned by the government but are leased to private companies to operate.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) recently launched the programme in the state on 33,000 hectares of land provided by 28 communities. Initiatives like this come with a lot of excitement.

A former commissioner for agriculture in the state, Julius Egbedi said, “The time to begin the expansion of the oil palm sector is now. The accelerated production of oil palm will reduce poverty in our communities, move the country from over-dependence on crude oil economy and promote agriculture.”

When the reporter visited the vast oil palm plantation at Nsukwa, its mill was in operation and workers were busy. But the management declined any interview.

Compliance efforts

There have been efforts, though not well coordinated, to comply with the deforestation rule in Nigeria. For instance, in Edo State, where the state government has encouraged estate farming in oil palms, there is an effort to ensure that investors in oil palm there plant a given number of trees for every one they cut.

According to Governor Godwin Obaseki, the state monitors the compliance. He said in an interview with TELL magazine in July 2024 that officials of the state government visited Indonesia and Malaysia to learn about oil palm plantation before starting the Edo State oil palm programme.

His said, “Under the programme, we are working with a group of investors. We have set up a self-policing mechanism to make sure that each investor gives us a development programme, which will show how they intend to go about making sure that they operate with success.

“Don’t forget, Edo State really had a head start as two oil palms listed on the stock exchange are already situated in the state. We had the benefit, the advantage and the knowledge of these companies to set up a programme. To also make sure that part of the programme ensured that we complied with global best practices, under what you call  Responsible Palm Oil Cultivation Programme, we got the certificate. So, oil palm that is grown in Edo State is globally certified.”

Other states are following that footstep, but the challenge is that aside from the efforts coming a little too late, the authorities have not done enough to properly articulate a policy for all to follow and educate the farmers in the field.

That is not the only area where the farmer is yearning for government intervention.

Sunday Usi, who runs his family cocoa farm in Esimoko in Ndokwa East LGA of Delta State, when asked about the EU threat, said cocoa farmers in Ndokwa had suffered from flooding since 2021, with the 2022 being the most devastating. He expressed the regret that farmers were left to their fate any time this problem comes.

Lack of proper information

Many cocoa farmers also complained of lack of proper information dissemination on the matter. Not even when it came from third parties, like the produce buyers, who also may have been ignorant of the development on the deforestation rule.

Usi said produce buyers usually came from Oyo and Ondo states to take their produce off them. But he said they had never informed him about the EU’s threat to ban cocoa imports from Nigeria.

Perhaps, the farmers could be excused because the body they would normally look up to for information within the locality in that regard appeared to be in the dark too.

The Administrative Secretary of Cocoa Association of Nigeria (CAN), the umbrella body of cocoa dealers and merchants in Ikom, Cross River State, Egim Etta Tawo, was also unaware of the looming danger on the trade where he makes a living, and where he also occupies a position expected to see to the welfare of farmers there.

He said that he was not aware of the EU’s threat to ban cocoa from Nigeria for failure to conform to regulations on afforestation.

In the cities, especially in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), government and association officials were in panic mode, uncertain of what the next step of the EU would be to the appeals for them to shift the deadline. What they would not readily admit is that they were adopting the usual fire brigade approach.

Deadline extended but…

Had the EU not shifted the deadline, beginning from January 1, 2025, none of those products would have been legally allowed into any European country.

While the authorities in Nigeria started the race to address the conditions at the eleventh hour, our reporter sought to know how much preparations had been made to meet the stated conditions at the local level.

Findings show that the government had demonstrated ill preparedness. To start with, the farmers, for whom there should have been some form of education on the issue were unaware of the looming danger about four months to the deadline. Perhaps the most surprising response is the approach of the government to the threat to an agricultural product that contributes the highest to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  There were series of meetings between July and August involving the Cocoa Farmers Association of Nigeria (CFAN); National Cocoa Management Committee and the federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, among others. The CFAN and the cocoa committee then wrote to the EU pleading for a shift in the deadline.

The executive director of the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN), Patrick Adebola, said the challenge was that, unlike countries like Ghana, the cocoa industry in Nigeria is deregulated. The good news, he said, is that there is a movement forward, and that is because the National Cocoa Management Committee (NCMC), now has the mandate of the federal government to spearhead the supervision of the industry.

He said, “so, this body has now been saddled with the responsibility to organise the country on how to comply with the EU’s deforestation rule. Nigeria is the first country that would now have a task force on the EUDR.”

But this first step forward by Nigeria came barely four months to the deadline. Generally, the prognosis does not hold promises for the poor farmer sweating out in the field, hoping that the fortune will surpass the previous outcome in the international market.

At the local level, the attitude towards the EUDR is ambivalent. There are farmers who believe that were the EU to drop the hammer on them over deforestation, they would be targeting the wrong group of people. According to those in this school of thought, those who should be blamed for deforestation are the loggers. The cocoa farmers, they argue, can never be logically accused of attacking the forest, even when they clear the jungle for the purpose of planting. They argue that the farmer needs shade for cocoa, particularly while it is growing and, therefore, always plants another kind of tree to protect cocoa tree, from the nursery stage.

So, when they open the forest to plant, the cocoa farmer does not leave the land bare, and therefore ensures that cocoa is not susceptible to unfavourable weather. That is why there are other plants like banana, maize and yam planted along until the main crop matures.

For the trio of Mgbe, Joseph Udida, a farmer in Bendeghe and Flora Takim-Ndifon, President of Ikom Chamber of Commerce, Mines and Agriculture, the focus on farmers of cocoa, coffee and other produce is misplaced.  Takim-Ndifon said the EU should be looking at practitioners of other trade in the rural community; the loggers.

She said, “When you are talking about deforestation, the focus should be on the loggers; those who log for immediate gain, not cocoa farmers.”

They advanced their argument by saying the farmers and community at large are at the receiving end of the activities of the loggers.

Udida said, “Trees help to conserve water. When the rain is falling, the trees retain the water in their roots and release them through evaporation and give rise to another rainfall. If it is not retained, it will fall to the ground and sink. Before the sun will hit the ground and get that evaporation it is not that fast and quick.”

According to him, the farmer, therefore, gets the flak because there was no protection for his crop. He said the depletion of the forest also affects the community because the removal of the trees that act as wind-shield exposes the buildings to hazard.

He said, “The forests used to reduce the wind. But now the wind comes directly to the houses and affects the buildings.” So, either way, deforestation is not a practice that the farmer wants to indulge in.

Farmers in Cross River State posit that to tame the loggers, pressure should be put on them by the government through the Department of Forestry. But the farmers see a problem of enforcement and policy crisis here. This is because loggers also occupy a space in the economy, such that stopping them would be virtually impossible.

Incidentally, they also export their products to markets that include the EU. And because of the weak laws in the West African countries, Nigeria inclusive, trees get felled and taken out of the country without loggers bothering about replacement.  The European Union made a law, prior to the EUDR, known as the European Union Timber Regulation, EUTR, which sought to give guidelines towards the regulation of afforestation, thus forcing people to plant trees wherever there had been some measure of forest degradation. The EUTR imposed restriction on export of woods to the European countries from territories where there was no compliance.

However, there are no official records that would have enabled the government to motivate people to plant trees in such areas. It is believed that because of the steps taken by the EU, through the timber regulation, exports to Europe have been quite wobbly.

Checks show that the law did not stop the loggers, rather it encouraged illegal trade for which loggers got new markets. The latest beneficiaries are India and China. The EUDR is an offshoot of the EUTR, also adopted to combat the effect of climate change in the world.

Adebola does not really believe that African countries contribute much to greenhouse emissions enough to justify the imposition of the EUDR deadline.

On his part,  Tawo, the administrative secretary of Cocoa Association of Nigeria (CAN) does not believe that the crux of the matter is deforestation. He said the EU is on the neck of Nigerian cocoa farmers over reluctance to maintain standard in the products sent across to foreign nations.

“The threat of not buying Nigerian cocoa is associated with not meeting international specifications not exceeding five per cent slaty; which is cocoa that is not properly fermented. The chocolate taste comes from fermentation. After breaking the cocoa, you cover it for about seven days to give it that flavor. But a lot of people are in a hurry. You can break cocoa today and start drying it tomorrow, and it won’t give it that flavour.”

The processing of cocoa before being exported has been criticised over the years. The haste in production that does not allow for fermentation, which would have increased the value of cocoa beans from Nigeria, is often an issue because there are farmers, who either because they lack the experience and expertise required to package their products or they are in a hurry to get them across to the merchants, fail to dry properly.

To Adebola, therefore, the problem of quality control is due to the absence of a national body entrusted with the responsibility to regulate the industry. This, he said, will now be adequately addressed through the NCMC. However, the authorities must ensure that this is done with all the seriousness that it deserves.

Tawo recalled the crisis experienced in June 2015, when the EU banned some agricultural products from Nigeria, including beans, because they contained a high level of pesticide, which was considered dangerous to human health.

Also, sometimes in 2021 there were speculations that the EU was planning to ban Nigeria’s cocoa but Mufutau Abolarin, the President of CAN, denounced the report. He reportedly told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), then that no such issue had been discussed at the Council of International Cocoa Organisation, ICCO, of which he is a member.

He was quoted to have said, “We can confidently affirm that at no time was Nigeria in the red list of any cocoa importing or consuming country, then or now.”

He, however, said that there were cases of complaints against the use of “adulterated and sometimes abuse of pesticides in cocoa production,” but claimed that such were being reduced through interaction and training of farmers.

But he did not deny the proposed ban that brought panic this time around. Rather, his association, the CFAN and the National Cocoa Management Committee had to persuade the EU to shift grounds on the deadline.

‘Efforts not approached with sincerity’

There are those who believe that efforts at meeting the 18-months deadline were not done with sincerity, which raises fears that nothing much might be done during the extension period.

The president of Calabar Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, (CALCCIMA) Etim David Etim, blames officials of government whom he said are complacent and leave matters to gather dust only to resort to a panic mode at the tail end.

He said, “Before the EU does anything in terms of standardisation, they send out notices which may be three years back. It comes as an alert because they have taken a decision.

“Nigeria is in the receipt of the alert. Somebody is assigned to monitor those alerts. But most times, those alerts come only to government functionaries who are not farmers. He sees the alert on his email, he just looks at it and passes. Five years down the line, they now want to implement it then you start running helter-skelter like a headless chicken.”

Though the law was adopted in June 2023, the notification came way back in 2021. On November 17 of that year the European Commission published its proposal for a regulation of deforestation. Even that was a follow up to an earlier publication in 2019 of a communication on EU action to protect the global forest. One of the five options in the analysis published was eventually adopted after a report, said to have been subjected to ‘extensive consultation exercise’, was presented for consideration, the final version of which was agreed to in December 2022 by the European Parliament and the Council.

The EUDR leaned on the EUTR, its precursor, drawing lessons from its implementation. What that means is that Nigerian officials, knowing how the rule affected the wood industry, should have taken a cue from there to prevent the looming negative impact for the cocoa industry, conscious of the fact that it is the highest contributor to the country’s GDP, in the agriculture sector.

Stakeholders believe that the lacklustre attitude of the government in this case is unpardonable. They point out that the same sector had suffered from similar complaints in the past. That was in 2016 when some Nigerian food items were banned by the EU.

The United Kingdom also issued 13 border rejection alerts to Nigerian beans exporters between January and June 2015. This development was of great concern to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s former coordinating minister of the economy and current director-general of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

She had lamented the losses incurred from the rejection of Nigeria’s agricultural products at the international level, while speaking at the launch of a programme in Abuja by the world body to help train Nigerians on meeting the global standard to prevent further losses.

“Nigeria is the world’s largest producer and consumer of cow pea. Sesame is primarily an export crop, and Nigeria is the world’s fourth leading producer, exporting to the EU, Japan, South Korea and other Asian markets.

“However, Nigerian cow pea and sesame exports have increasingly faced rejections in several destination markets due to non-compliance with international SPS requirements,” Okonjo-Iwea reportedly said.

Though the project held in March this year, it was designed to help stakeholders with international safety and quality certification for sesame and cow pea, the problem also affects other agriculture products. It will be recalled that the attempt to popularise the export of yam in 2017 by a former minister of agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, ran into controversy because some of the yam tubers went bad before they arrived at destination in the United States and Europe.

The former minister said then that Nigeria was the leading producer of yams in the world.

But why do products from Nigeria find themselves at the receiving end of international regulations and standards?

The chairman of the Ondo State Cocoa Council, Olusegun Awolumate, said, “The problem we have is that there is no functional coordinating body for these commodities at the federal level. That is why all efforts are not coordinated. I have been advocating for a central and functional coordinating body. What (I believe is that) the National Cocoa Management Committee doesn’t have the strength of what they should do.”

He said the move for the NCMC to metamorphose to that national body that will undertake proper coordination of the industry leaves much to cheer.

The closest Nigeria has got to that in recent years was under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who set up the National Cocoa Development Committee. On the board of the committee were deputy governors of the cocoa producing states. That gave the states the zeal to align with the national objective to rev up the production of cocoa in Nigeria.

By the time Obasanjo left, production had moved from 165,000 metric tonnes to 300,000 metric tonnes. Unfortunately, that committee was not backed by law. So, the tempo of production went down when President Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration dismantled the committee.

Today, Nigeria is touted to produce 350,000 metric tonnes annually. That was its production in the 1970s when the country was number two in the world, after Ghana, which then was producing 380,000 metric tonnes. Sadly, Ivory Coast, which then came third with a production of 180,000 metric tonnes, is now leading the two countries with over two million metric tonnes. However, Ghana, in its case, has moved far beyond the 380,000 mark to over one million. Nigeria comes a distant sixth in the world now.

Last year, Ambassador Nura Rimi, Permanent Secretary, federal ministry of industry trade and investment, said, “our cocoa exports have grown significantly, with a revenue increase of 50 per cent in 2022. We aim to increase cocoa production to 500,000 metric tonnes by 2025.”

The question now is whether Nigeria is ready to meet up with the conditions even with the extension of the deadline.

Awolumate said, “We are talking but I don’t think we are ready.”

Though the NCMC and other stakeholders’ efforts have yielded time, those who should know in the industry said the CFAN and exporters actually drove that initiative. The President of CFAN said that government does not seem to be bothered about the problem faced by farmers in the sector. So, “cocoa farmers needed to write because, it is our business, it is our work, and we believe, it would affect us most if we did not work on it.”

This report, the first in two parts, is a collaboration between the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, ICIR, and Bushlink. It was supported with funds from the National Endowment for Democracy.