In pictures: Nigerian palm oil

Essential Oil

Palm oil is an essential ingredient for Nigerian cuisine, and is also used in household goods like soap.


West Africa used to be the centre of the palm oil industry but in the 1870s, British administrators took the plant to Malaysia. Now Malaysia is the world's leading palm oil exporter, based on huge plantations.
Most palm oil in Nigeria is still produced by smallholders, such as Chijioke Nneji.

Culture
Chijioke, 28, has been farming these trees since he was a boy. He selects a tree that he knows will have ripe palm kernels and hacks away at the hard spiky fronds.
According to the World Rainforest Movement, an organisation set up to prevent deforestation, there are an estimated seven million people like Chijioke and his family producing palm oil.

Smallholders
"I don’t know how many trees we have, but it must be hundreds," Chijioke says.
Unlike neighbouring countries like Ghana and Cameroon, there are very few large scale plantations in Nigeria.
About 80% of Nigeria’s palm oil is produced by smallholders.

Shared proceeds
Palm kernels grow throughout the year, but crops are bigger in the wet months between June and October.
In the dry season when one person’s crop might not make enough oil to be worth the trouble, Chijioke and his neighbours pool their produce and split the proceeds.
This neighbour breaks the kernels into lumps, leaving them to ripen for two days.

Honour your father
Village life in eastern Nigeria is governed by cultural practices.
In Chijioke’s part of Enugu State, when a man’s father dies he must buy a horse and slaughter it. The skull and tail are then hung in their compound.
Chijioke’s father died two years ago.
“No-one can say that I did not honour my father in the right way," he says proudly.

Steaming
To make palm oil, the ripe, fatty kernels are boiled overnight in a big pot.
This loosens the fibre around the central nut in the kernel.

Foot press

Once the kernels have been picked and brought home, women take over the palm oil production. They pour the hot kernels into a hollowed out log, placed in a shady spot. Amuche Nneji steps into the trough and walks up and down its length. As they add more water, the husk begins to fall away from the nut, releasing the fatty yellow juice.

Sucking and burping

As Amuche treads up and down, the mixture makes a sucking, burping sound. It clings to her feet, clogging her toes and spreading a vivid yellow stain up her ankles. There are two places in the state that have machines to do this, Amuche says, but people have stopped taking their crop to them as police demand bribes from people moving goods, wiping out their profits.

Fat floating on water

This harvest from a handful of trees has taken 48 hours to process. “This amount of kernels will get us one full jerry can of oil, that’s about 20 litres,” says Amuche. They will be able to sell that for 3,000 naira ($20; £14). In the wet season they can make more oil, but the price goes down.

Seeds

Traders come and buy the seeds for further processing. The seeds are roasted and then broken open. The translucent white inside the nut can be eaten and is itself rich in oil. This oil is extracted by a more complicated process and turned into a kind of tonic oil, which people rub on their children’s bodies. They say the oil prevents colds and flu.

Neglected?

In the 1960s an attempt was made to build large-scale plantations for oil palms in Nigeria, but they have all failed. Nigeria’s agricultural income has withered from almost 100% of GDP to 18%. A former governor of a palm oil producing state once told journalists he wept when he visited Malaysia and saw how they had benefited from the crop.