National Sugar Development Council (NSDC) says Federal Government has introduced new guidelines and benchmarks for raw sugar allocation for operators in the sector.
Executive Secretary of the council, Dr Latif Busari, made this known in a statement in Abuja on Monday, and said that the measure was to improve performance of operators of Backward Integration Programme (BIP).
In the statement by the council’s Senior Information Officer, Mr Yunusa Abdullahi, Busari said in the guidelines, operators would be required to submit their requests for sugar allocation for any year in December of the preceding year.
He added that 2017 allocation would be the last sugar allocation based on the old criteria, including market and share refinery capacity.
According to him, as from 2018 allocation shall be strictly based on quantitatively verified improvement in performance.
Busari, however, added that Sugar Roadmap Implementation Committee (SURMIC) and Sugar Industry Monitoring Group (SIMG) would be expected to conduct quarterly monitoring of all BIP projects.
“Any operator that fails to achieve performance target for the year, based on BIP commitments as released by the Joint Harmonisation meeting, shall be penalised for poor performance, with reduction in quota commensurate with performance scores.
“Scores by operators shall be in percentages and an operator shall be allocated the exact percentage of its score in the year’s projected allocation,’’ he said.
