By Uthman Salami
The president of Dangote Industry Limited, Aliko Dangote has revealed that the Group’s Nigerian new fertilizer plant will soon commence exportation of its first shipment to Louisiana.
The exportation which is scheduled to commence in July is expected to have chunk of its exports from the plant to Brazil.
The new plant by African richest man located at the Lekki Free Zone in Lagos State is designed to manufacture 3 million tpy of urea is expected to supply all the major markets in sub-Saharan Africa.
Many in Nigeria also hope the Dangote plant will help alleviate chronically low crop yields in Africa’s most populous country, which are partly due to insufficient access to fertilizer.
According to the World Bank, Nigeria consumed around 20 kg of fertilizer per hectare of arable land in 2018, compared with 73 kg in South Africa and 393 kg in China.
Nigeria’s Central Bank bars the use of its foreign exchange for fertilizer imports as part of a raft of controls aimed at boosting domestic production.