Commodity Brokers Association of Nigeria (CBAN) has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to sign the Chartered Institute of Commodity Brokers Association of Nigeria (CICBN) Bill into law before June.
Mr Ishaqa Yahaya, Coordinator of the North Central zonal chapter of the association, made the appeal at a news conference in Abuja on Sunday.
Yahaya said when signed into law, the bill would enhance farmers’ access to storage facilities, thereby reducing post-harvest losses.
He added that the bill would also bring about “unprecedented and unimaginable value addition to the nation’s agricultural activities that would boost the sector.
”It will interest you to know that the CICBN bill has passed through all the legislative processes in the National Assembly.
“If signed, it will facilitate farmers’ access to storage facilities and plug the missing link between them and processors.
“This will encourage companies to adopt the use of commodity exchange as a point of purchase of their input requirements.
“The commodity exchange ecosystem works with properly registered warehouses and this should ordinarily address the warehousing issues.
“The convenient transaction settlement system is deployed for the benefit of the farmers and the manufacturing companies who can now have easy access to their raw materials and inputs locally,” he said.
The CBAN coordinator noted that legislative work on the proposed law might start all over if not signed before the end of the Eighth National Assembly in June.
Yahaya said that the focus of CICBN was to ensure there were trained and certified professionals in commodity trading in the country.
The bill, according to him, also seeks to establish an institution that will regulate the commodity market through certification of practitioners, among others.
He, however, expressed optimism that Buhari would sign the CICBN and other agriculture-related bills into law before the end of the outgoing Assembly. ====NAN
