Jim Sutter is the chief executive officer of the US Soybean Export Council (USSEC). In this interview with Josephine Okojie, he spoke about the organisation’s annual executive programme and its support to the Nigerian feed industry.
Yearly, the US Soybean Export Council and others put together an annual executive programme in Nigeria. What is it about and how will it help the Nigerian feed industry?
We’re an organisation that represents the full soy value chain in the United States. We represent farmers, exporters, and every other sort of company that would be involved in getting soybeans from where they are produced to export locations. And then, we represent those groups in markets around the world.
Our work normally touches on an annual basis at least 80 countries, and our core objectives are to make people understand the value of US soy, understand how it could be different from other types of soy, make sure that they have a preference for it, and also work on market issues.
Nigeria is a different sort of market because it’s not a large importer today. But we think that Nigeria holds great potential to be an importer. But also, we think there is an opportunity for us to bring the sort of skills that we like to teach in the country, such as how to improve the efficiency of producing protein products and how to help countries improve the nutrition for the people who live there as well as help companies become better producers. And that’s what we’ve been doing in many countries around the world over the years.
We think that Nigeria is a place where there’s plenty of opportunity for companies to do things using modern technology and we’d love to share that with these companies and help them in that way.
We also think that there’s a real opportunity for people in Nigeria. When you look at the statistics, there’s an issue with low consumption of protein. So, we believe there’s an opportunity to help people have better diets and consume more protein.
How is the USSEC supporting Nigeria to improve the nutrition of its citizens through soybean consumption?
The biggest way we’re trying to help is to build awareness. That is to build awareness of the problem. And then, we’re trying to bring together companies that may be able to help with resolving that problem.
We are not a donor organisation, so we will not be someone that comes here to provide money or something in that regard, but we will try and build awareness, and then we will try and do training for the people that could help to be able to utilise the resources here in Nigeria to address the protein problem, or perhaps enough to be able to put together economic packages or something that will allow for importation if that is the best answer. So, mainly, we will just be trying to build awareness and help with education.
How is your organisation helping Nigerian farmers to bridge the country’s soybean deficit?
With the poultry industry specifically, around the world, we run programs on how to maximise the efficiency of poultry production, using the best technology, utilising the best feed formulation, and understanding the ingredients that you’re using.
We have taken representatives from the Nigerian poultry industry to forums around the world. We’ve taken them to the international poultry event in Georgia, which happens yearly. We’ve taken them to other training sessions to try and help give them exposure to global experts in the poultry production field.
For farmers specifically, we run a course on soy agronomy that will help people producing soybean do it more efficiently. So it’s sort of unusual for us to be teaching people how to produce soy because we’re mainly involved in the exportation of soy. But here in Nigeria, we think it’s important that we help people also be able to produce soy. For the farmers here, we think that there’d be more efficient ways to do that to improve their yields.
We’ve also teamed up with some regional soy production groups and we’re working with Nigerians specifically on this as well, to get them in contact or to link them up with the group at the University of Illinois in the US, and they try to help people be more effective trying to produce soybeans. We have secured some USAID funding that we’re able to link up these people together with now, and we think that could be beneficial for the local industry.
We believe that if a country like Nigeria starts to produce some more soy, it will just get more people used to using soy, either as a human food directly, or as a feedstock for poultry or other livestock, the dairy industry, and all of those industries will benefit from more protein. So I think there’s plenty of room for Nigeria to produce more, and import some as well.
The US Soy Export Council and its partners have been organising this annual executive programme in Nigeria for 4years and across countries. What are the peculiarities in the Nigerian soybean market?
We started this program in 2019 in Nigeria. We work with a local training organisation, and we try to have other local people involved in some countries where we do our work.
In Africa, North East Asia, and the Americas we have USSEC and these are regional centres. We put them in the countries where we think that there’s a lot of call for them, then we bring people from the region into the training centres, so we don’t only limit it to the countries where it’s located.
We’ve learned that people in Nigeria are very anxious to learn. People are very hungry for the training that we’re providing, which is a great thing. We’re learning that there is a big variation in the extent of training that has happened previously. Some organisations here are world-class and use really good technology and some, not so much.
We’re learning, especially lately, that there is optimism about the future. I think Nigeria has been going through tough times, but people are ready to tackle those problems. There’s a lot of resilience among the people here, so we’re excited to continue doing this training to try to bring up the level, and capabilities of these future leaders of Nigerian companies.
USSEC has launched the Right to Protein Campaign. Can you tell us more about it?
The campaign is something we’ve been talking about for a few years in various places around the world, and it’s a target.
We work with other groups such as nutrition institutes, hospitals, doctors, and people who are experts in the field of nutrition and know the situation on the ground. What we are trying to do is to build awareness of the problem and then try and help rally people that can’t be the ones to solve the problem.
We will certainly utilise the things I talked about: working with the poultry industry, feed industry, and farmers of soy and producers of soy products. But that is a small part of how you are going to solve this overall protein deficit problem. But we think that, by building awareness and getting hopefully, government officials more aware of the problem than they were before we’ll get some actions being taken because the statistics are quite staggering here in Nigeria.
Nigeria and the US have comparative and competitive advantages in agricultural products, including soybean. In which areas can both countries collaborate to expand trade?
I think that the opportunity is for Nigeria to increase the productivity of its production. Nigeria can learn from the technology that they can take in from the US and other places as an opportunity for them to be more productive. Then, I believe that they can be a very efficient producer here to export to other markets across Africa. Much of the world today is struggling with shortages of labour, and capacity to get things done. Here in Nigeria labour is abundant, so I don’t know how manufacturers can look at that.
That’s what we’ve seen in many parts of the world, where you can get your economy opened up and liberalise trade. To me, that is the big opportunity – the people. If you can get your trade liberalized, Nigeria can benefit from open markets and trade. You can build a huge production hub here and export the things you produce, and import the commodities that you may not be able to produce yourselves.
