The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has contacted pre-shipment inspection agents at Nigerian ports on the need for them to collaborate to ensure that export-bound foods are not rejected abroad.

The collaboration move was contained in a statement signed by the NAFDAC director-general, Mojisola Adeyeye and issued on Sunday.

The statement said that Ms Adeyeye reached out to the pre-shipment agents at a consultative meeting held on Friday. 

Ms Adeyeye said the collaboration followed the search for a lasting solution to Nigerian non-oil exports rejected abroad. She said the collaboration would revamp the export trade in the non-oil sector and reposition Nigeria in the global market.

The NAFDAC boss expressed the agency’s discomfort at the alarming rate at which Nigerian food exports are rejected abroad. She said the meeting aimed to build effective collaboration with NAFDAC to complement its robust regulatory policies geared towards understanding the NAFDAC export processes.

Ms Adeyeye said the collaboration was also to safeguard a unified exportation procedure and zero rejection of Nigeria’s export products.

She lamented that NAFDAC, which she described as the competent authority on food safety matters with global accreditation in food safety testing, could be left out of the list of organisations whose inputs were required before Clean Certificate of Inspection (CCI) is issued by pre-shipment inspection agents.

(NAN)