Lagos - Lagos Governor, Babatunde Fashola, is next week scheduled to commission a multibillion Naira integrated manufacturing facility for crop protection chemicals and foliar fertilizers at the Lekki Free Zone.
Candel, the country’s leading agricultural inputs development and distribution company, has built the facility whose commissioning is set for Tuesday.
According to the company, which is in its first phase when completed will deliver a facility with a capacity for 80 million litres of formulated products per year.
It will enable Candel to deliver solutions most suited to Nigeria’s tropical climate and peculiar farming systems. There is currently no local production of crop protection agrochemicals in Nigeria with over $400 million in foreign exchange expended annually to import them.
Charles Anudu, the Chairman of Candel, underlined the company's innovative and entrepreneurial spirit as well as the many years of experience in the field of crop protection and nutrition.
“Our company has a reputation for being at the leading edge of innovation and entrepreneurship that have helped to frame our industry in the context of the local realities. Our world class factory is geared towards tailor-made solutions that address the peculiarities of our farming systems thereby improving the industry economics and competitiveness of West Africa’s crop farmers,” Anudu said.
Lekki Free Zone Development Company (LFZDC) Managing Director, Younghua Ding, welcomed the establishment of the facility.
“We are very pleased that Candel chose the Lekki Free Zone to site its pioneering project and happy with the rapid progress and quality of construction so far. Projects of this nature create highly skilled and entry-level job opportunities for our local communities which is a major benefit of a Free Zone like ours. We will continue to ensure that the framework conditions are attractive for serious investors like
Candel, especially with our state-of- the-art infrastructure,” Ding said.
Construction of the production facility began in early 2014 after an extensive Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) exercise under the full supervision and guidance of the Federal and Lagos State Ministries of Environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment