An Agriculturist, Mr Oluwafemi Aliu, on Thursday said appropriate preservation was necessary to improve the value chain of yams to earn income from the export of the commodity.
Aliu, the Chief Executive Officer of MyFarmbase Africa, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.
The expert said the major challenge usually encountered in the export of yams was the maintenance of the right temperature for the commodity before arrival at its export destination.
“The process of yam for export is really difficult in comparison to other agriculture commodities.
“The easiest way to optimize the value chain for yams is through proper preservation. When you preserve effectively, it will get to its export destination in good condition.
“One of the challenges of exporting yam is that it still retains its moisture at the time of export; it is not totally dry, so most times it gets spoilt before it arrives at the export destination.
“Even when the government exported yams some years back, most of them got spoilt before getting to the port of destination.
“The easiest way to go about yam exports and get income is to improve on the storage process; yams cannot withstand heat and some level of humidity,” the expert said.
Aliu said the use of Ultrimetric bags to export yams could help solve the issues of humidity if they were properly bagged in the export container.
He said in addition to export yams; there was a need for a storage facility that could maintain a good temperature and the best possible temperature such that there would not be oxidation.
“At the moment, there are ultrametric bags that can effectively maintain the right temperature for yams during export. It basically sucks out all the moisture in the yam and keeps it a little drier than when you harvested it.
“In Ghana, these are the kind of the things they deploy and they are able to cash in on yam exports because they do it on a massive scale even much more than Nigeria.
“The bags have been designed to maintain the temperature of their environment at the same level from where they were moved to the temperature of where they are going to.
“That is ultrametric bags can easily preserve the yams from Nigeria to any the country they are heading to.
“Yams need preservation; that is why locally you need an effective barn system to keep the harvested yams in good condition,” Aliu said.
Speaking on research to improve the value chain of yam exports, the expert said at the moment, investment and capitalization were paramount as the researches were already available.
“I do not think we need new research to preserve yams, the information is already out there, we even have Poundo yams that are highly patronized by the UK.’’
He said that improving the yam value chain was not much about research but should be about public and private investment to upscale these researches and innovations to improve the value chain.
“It is not the role of the government to export yams, the government needs to capitalize on investment, create an enabling environment for the private sector to tap the opportunities in the yam value chain.
“We need more funding for yam farmers and make ease of doing business not just for the farmers but for yam processors and preservers.
“There has to be that level of resource-based support and capitalization as well as provision of government resources to boost yam value chain,” the expert said. (NAN)
