Adulterated palm oil and NADAL’s carbon shot

Greg Odogwu

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The viral video of a heartless businessman mixing dye in palm oil—popularly called red oil—to sell to unsuspecting consumers with huge financial gains for himself has emitted so much angst and anger in the country that one cannot help but comment on this insidious wickedness. While health experts condemned the act as ‘slow murder’ of the palm oil-consuming citizens, considering that some chemical components of the dye are carcinogenic, I am of the view that Nigerians should put a lid on their anger and then take a deliberate overall view of the palm oil industry in Nigeria and how it has failed to put this critical condiment on our table.

There is a troubling reality that we must come to grips with. Whereas our ecosystem is bustling with ubiquitous, undulating green palm trees, we cannot boast of commensurate flowing jugs of palm oil.

Especially for citizens from the southern part of the country, there is this perception that we have so much abundant supply of palm trees from the Almighty Creator that we do not know what to do with them. They are everywhere—concealed like ancestral fortresses deep in the forests and aligned like aesthetic adornments on the roadsides. In fact, builders keep cutting them down to make way for new construction projects. Similarly, some families who have migrated to urban areas have left their fallow in the villages, so much so that the palm fruits keep rotting away or are eaten up by rodents, birds and sundry wild mammals.

But the truth is bitter. We are a nation struggling to feed ourselves with crops that used to be so common that we gave them away like candies to our neighbours. I grew up hearing that we had to donate some of our palm nuts to some Asian countries, and we also taught them how to farm them. But today, these nations have overtaken us in palm crop farming – and indeed developed the value chain to generate tens of by-products from the crops, like palm fatty acid distillates, palm kernel expeller [for feed and cosmetics], and variant empty fruit fibres (for bioenergy, fertilisers and building materials).

This means that while our neighbours and former beneficiaries are thriving in industrial palm value-chain utilisation, we are still at the elementary level of trying to feed ourselves. Yet, even at this we have obviously failed to achieve, resulting in the outrageous and unfortunate suicidal adulteration that is going on in our backyard.

Here are the facts:  Nigeria has a significant and persistent palm oil shortage, with demand far exceeding local production, leading to massive imports and high local prices. This happened over the years, as a result of a decline in investments and corruption in government-established palm crop farming and processing corporations across the sub-national enclaves.

Our leaders never designed forward-looking economic programmes that factored in our burgeoning population, aimed at boosting domestic output to bridge this huge supply gap. Hence, despite historical dominance, Nigeria’s production has stagnated, creating a deficit of hundreds of thousands to over a million metric tonnes annually.

According to statistics, Nigeria needs over 3 million tonnes of palm oil annually, but produces around 1.4 to 2.5 million tonnes, creating a substantial deficit. Therefore, we rely heavily on imports, even from neighbouring Benin Republic, to cover the shortfall, spending hundreds of millions annually. This is why the shortage causes high local prices, affecting consumers and industrial users, in that way setting up the conducive atmosphere for commercial fraud and industrial malpractice.

Nevertheless, we need to keep our eyes on solutions and not on lamentations. This is why I believe that one of the areas that provides a veritable injection for healing the agro and palm production sector is carbon and biodiversity credits. During the just-concluded 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, popularly known as COP30, Nigeria’s National Agricultural Land Development Authority launched an innovative project to generate carbon credits from palm plantations and other agricultural hubs.

The NALDA plans to get high-integrity carbon credits from its vast farm estates, including oil palm, using tree planting and reforestation to boost farmer incomes and rural economies.  This initiative, the Plantation Carbon Roadmap, aims to integrate farm revenue with carbon credit earnings, which would practically move farmers into the middle class through sustainable practices on lands like oil palm plantations. With a goal to transition low-income Nigerians to middle-income status through sustainable farming and carbon credits, it will integrate tree planting, estate rehabilitation, and reforestation into mega farm estates as carbon sinks that will dovetail into the emerging global carbon trading ecosystem.

This it will be achieved by covering over 20,000 hectares under global monitoring standards – measurement, reporting and verification. It will develop processing hubs for byproducts (like empty fruit bunches) into biochar and returning them to soil, or using mill effluent for energy, which presents carbon sequestration that creates high-value credits.  Therefore, Nigeria’s agricultural expansion in tandem with the global carbon market – protecting the biodiversity as seen with the Bonobo Habitat in the Democratic Republic of Congo – uses oil palm and other farms as assets for climate action and economic growth.

The NALDA’s programme is groundbreaking and could become a fulcrum for lifting rural communities and strengthening our journey toward a middle-income economy. A couple of months ago, when President Bola Tinubu announced the Renewed Hope Ward Development Programme, I expressed optimism that this could become an avenue for mainstreaming grassroots empowerment through innovation and knowledge management.

Subsequently, when I listened to NALDA’s Director-General, Engr Cornelius Adebayo, at COP30 in Belem, I understood the philosophy of the carbon credit scheme as the same principle that runs as a socio-economic reform thread echoing Tinubu’s RHWDP, on a sector-specific farmer empowerment thrust.

He explained that under ‘the Renewed Hope Mega Farm Estates project’, each participating farmer will receive five hectares of land, enabling them to earn a steady income from agricultural production while also benefiting financially from carbon credits generated through structured reforestation and massive tree-planting programmes across the estates.

The farm estates—spanning 5,000 to 25,000 hectares—are fully mechanised hubs equipped with roads, irrigation systems, processing centres, power infrastructure, and secured perimeters lined with thousands of climate-resilient trees planted specifically to produce certified carbon removals.

Without a doubt, carbon credit generation helps oil palm production in many ways that will push the nation into self-sufficiency. Carbon credit generation in oil palm systems comes mainly from practices that reduce emissions or increase carbon sequestration, such as reforesting or conserving degraded land, using methane-capturing systems in palm oil mills, soil carbon improvement, renewable energy from palm restudies, and avoiding deforestation. As the oil palm producers sell carbon credits, they earn extra income without increasing production volume. This specifically improves profitability for smallholder farms and helps offset rising production costs.

What is more, as the farmers earn carbon credits, they adopt improved practices like zero-burning, organic mulching, efficient fertiliser use, precision agriculture, and renewable energy in mills. This is critical because experts have observed that the two major factors that degraded the country’s oil palm industry are ageing plantations [contributing to lower yields] and unsustainable regenerative practices [forcing practitioners to abandon scientific methods]. Therefore, an integration of climate action with a time-tested cooperative model could be the match needed for increased investments, to help us achieve self-sufficiency in palm oil production and for Nigeria to reclaim its position as one of the leading palm oil producers of the world.

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