Nigeria is strengthening the competitiveness of the cotton value chain through enhancing capacities of stakeholders, developing and improving market infrastructure, providing jute bags to prevent polypropylene contamination, improving and upgrading ginneries and extending services/training of farmers and farmers’ empowerment.

The investment climate and the fiscal regime will be removed. Tax on equipment and inputs will be removed. An industry wide tax holiday will be applied.

The development of the sector will be fast tracked across the entire value chain. Capacity building and skills development will be attended to. An export promotion strategy will be devised.

Over 20 tons of certified cotton seeds as well as 1.5 tons of foundation seeds will be released to cotton farmers in the country for the farming season.

The textile industry was one of the booming sub-sectors of the Nigerian economy in the post independence years.

Driven by locally grown cotton and with a huge demand for clothing by a fast growing population, it provided direct and indirect employment to hundreds of thousands of Nigerians for several decades.

Between 1985 and 1991, Nigeria’s textile industry recorded an annual growth of 67 per cent. In that period textile companies numbered around 180, employing about a million people, and accounting for over 60 per cent of the textile industry capacity in West Africa.