Reason for shea butter scarcity

Scarcity of Shea butter has been attributed to the neglect of the sub sector for many years by the government despite the huge earnings of over $72m annually as the highest producer in the world.
Food Farm News findings and checks from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development) FMARD) revealed this.

Findings revealed that the recent scarcity of the commodity is said to have occurred as a result of lack of processing cottage factories and equipments to get a refined final product into the market for consumers.

A source told Food Farm News that the scarcity was due to the unavailability of cottage factories for Shea farmers for easy processing, saying it’s a tedious job for farmers who have selected these Shea for processing to still be the one to go through the fatigue of value addition through processing, adding that government must make provision for cottage industry to add to the ones already made available by the FMARD in Oyo and Niger states.

Our source revealed that FG is planning to development more cottage factories across the Shea producing states to ensure that wastages and scarcity are well tackled to create availability for the demanding populace.

The source said that ‘’There are so many nuts on ground with processing as a challenge, the processing strength is very low, as they are not using optimal processing facilities that will quicken the value addition process. The manual labour cannot bring out the best quality of shea butter, but rather an efficient machine is needed, and that is why government has just installed two cottage factories well equipped in both Oyo and Niger state to fasten the processing of the selected nuts with installation work going on in Taraba and Benue states also’’