Chief Barr Chris Agara is an entrepreneur and chairman of AA Universal Agro Industries Limited, the company to which the Cross Rivers State government concessioned the cocoa processing plant. The company is in joint venture with Bean & Company Limited, a member of Israel’s LR GROUP. Both companies formed a Special Purpose Vehicle, SPV company known as AA Universal Bean & Company that is providing the management of the cocoa value chain. Chief Agara is the chairman of the company with Mr Ilan Lugassy as the Managing Director. In this interview, the entrepreneur gives an insight into what the team intends to do for the processing factory. He also speaks on other sundry issues. Our correspondent brings the excerpts:
Can you tell our team the potentials that are in the factory when it becomes fully operational. And how much do you think the firm can generate to the coffers of the Federal Government?
Ikom Cocoa Processing Factory can generate between $400 million to $600 million annually to the Federal Government’s coffers, if we take it to full potential, if we do value addition. what we are going to do is that we don’t want to export cocoa beans any longer. We want to process it into cocoa butter, cocoa liquor and cocoa powder and possibly chocolate and the potentials in Ikom in Cross River cocoa area can generate that amount, if we go for the full potentials.
Does your firm have any collaboration with any of these international agencies or your are banking on the Federal Government to come in and salvage situation?
We at AA Universal Agro Industries Limited have a grant agreement between the United States government through the United States Department of Trade and Development Agency, USTDA, to carry out a feasibility study and bankable business plan for the development and production of cocoa and casava farm produce and value addition processing from farm to table for both local use and export purposes.
This is to also ensure traceability, quality control and quality assurance of our agro products that will meet the minimum standards and best practice.
Bean & Co and the LR Group are one of the best agro development and value chain processors in the world.
We are working with a team that has the expertise where nothing is wasted. What we do is that we uptake cocoa pods from the farmers because the plenty shells that the farmers throw away, we can processed them to food paste. We process that sweetener, the one we lick, to juice, and we still use that same juice to process our sweetener for chocolate.
Chocolate is one hundred percent cocoa. Most of the chocolates you see in the market have sugar and probably sweetener. But in our own case our chocolate will not need all these external sweetener, because we will process the juice, those pulp that we lick, we will process them into juice and sweetener, and then used that to sweeten our chocolates so that our chocolate will be one hundred percent cocoa, which we find healthy.
And the cocoa pods we take from the farmers, we will also process those empty shells after removing the cocoa beans and the sweetener, we will process those empty shells into food paste, those food paste will be glutton free, so that nothing is wasted. The paste is very healthy for human consumption. It is a very popular paste in the United States and Europe. By so doing, we would have saved the farmers the problem of cracking their cocoa pods, drying their cocoa beans, using women and children for all these.
This is also an international concern because, international concern believe that children are being used to do this job, preventing them from going to school. That is where the issue of child’s labour comes in. They are against child labour. And they are very concerned about it. And so when we take all these protocols away from farmers, we save them so that their children can be free and go to school. They won’t be laboured, the women can also do other things for themselves. Beyond all these, we are going to be paying beyond the premium price of cocoa beans that farmers are presently offered, because we will support them in every ramification.
Can you throw light on the kind of support your organization intends to extend to farmers in the area?
We will import direct chemicals and pesticides. All the cry that chemicals had been adulterated will no longer be heard, because the chemicals that our firm will give to farmers won’t be adulterated, but genuine one.
We will also establish a micro finance bank to be called Farmers’ Micro Finance Bank. We have already registered the name with the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and the bank will become fully operational once the CBN gives its approval. The MFB will be providing credit to the farmers. All these are on the pipeline. You will have a sign of all these coming up before the end of the year. You will see a lot of activities taking place from that cocoa site.
