From Rotimi Asher Lagos 

Poultry farmers in Africa’s most populous nation have accused the Central Bank of Nigeria of distorting their The Chairman of the Association of Poultry Farmers (Ogun State), Idowu Asenuga, said 15 million trays of eggs are currently stockpiled without buyers.

The association boss attributed the crisis in the sector which cost farmers over N30bn on the CBN naira redesign policy and the resulting cash scarcity.

With the crisis, Asenuga said the “Ogun State Government has mopped up 10,000” trays of eggs to reduce the loss on poultry farmers. “We are still begging him to do more,” he noted.

Asenuga said on Channels TV “Demand has dipped, no thanks to the redesign policy of the CBN. But talking about the causes of the high prices, unfortunately, CBN has disrupted our businesses twice in the last three years. I can recall in 2020 during Covid, they banned the importation of maize which for me personally is a terrible decision to make.

“Because as of then, when I talked to the Statistician General (Yemi Kale) he told me they were never even consulted. There is a gap between the monetary policy and fiscal policy in Nigeria and it has not helped our business in any way.

“Price of maize in 2020 was about N90,000/ton as they put a ban on the importation, it went to about N250,000 and maize is about 50 per cent of our input.

“Right now, that we are about recovering from that disruption that was caused in 2020, here comes a currency redesign and poultry contributes about 25 per cent to the agricultural GDP which in turn contributes 25 per cent of the GDP.

He said the poultry sector could not harness the other channels of payment as advised by the CBN because at the retail end, the sellers are peasants and mostly unbanked.

Asenuga added, “They don’t do POS, they don’t know how to operate it and some of them don’t even have bank accounts. If you are buying six pieces of eggs, for instance, you are going to use cash.

“The informal sector is where our market is driven by cash. This has created a glut in our business and right now, we have 15 million trays of eggs stockpiled with farmers that they can’t just sell.”