By Max Bunmi Banjo
Sir: In July 2024, Mexico’s ambassador to Nigeria, Alfredo Miranda, said Mexico had committed roughly $100 million to restart hibiscus imports from Nigeria. Nearly two years later, that commitment has yet to produce a functioning trade relationship.
The pipeline is open. The trade has not restarted.
This matters because hibiscus is not just another agricultural export. It should have been straightforward. If we cannot get this right, the harder diversification challenges look much worse.
For a decade, the trade worked. Between 2008 and 2018, Nigeria was the dominant supplier of hibiscus to Mexico. According to SENASICA — Mexico’s agricultural inspection authority — Nigeria shipped roughly 68.6 million kilogrammes over that period, about 64 percent of Mexico’s total hibiscus imports.
The demand was structural. Agua de jamaica — one of the country’s most widely consumed drinks — drives steady industrial demand for hibiscus. Nigerian hibiscus was competitively priced and suitable for large-scale processing.
In early 2018 that trade stopped.
SENASICA detected khapra weevil, a quarantine pest, in Nigerian hibiscus shipments.
Imports were halted. Other suppliers moved quickly to fill the gap. By 2021 China had
captured the large majority of Mexico’s hibiscus import market, with Senegal and Sudan supplying smaller volumes.
The evidence suggests the failure was compliance, not quality. Pre-export inspection and container hygiene protocols were not consistently enforced, allowing a pest that exporters could have screened for to reach Mexican ports. The result was the loss of a market Nigeria had spent a decade developing.
The economic case for Nigeria’s return remains strong. Industry estimates suggest Chinese hibiscus arrives in Mexico in the mid-40 peso range per kilogramme. Before the disruption, Nigerian hibiscus sold for roughly 33 pesos — about a 25 percent price advantage.
1Mexico’s domestic production, concentrated in Guerrero state, is costlier and cannot meet national demand. A 2024 study from the country’s Universidad Autónoma
Chapingo suggests more than half of Mexico’s hibiscus consumption is supplied by imports.
Compliance, not price or quality, is what closed the market — and what reopening it requires.
There has been some movement toward resolving this.
In 2023 Mexico and Nigeria signed a bilateral phytosanitary Work Plan to address the original quarantine problem. It outlines what exporters must do to re-enter the Mexican market: NAQS certification, sealed container procedures and screening for khapra beetle contamination.
On paper, the path back is well-defined. In practice, not much has moved.
Three practical steps could accelerate the restoration of the trade. The first is building compliance capacity among exporters. Nigeria’s hibiscus production is concentrated in Kano and Katsina states, where exporters are typically medium-sized businesses rather than large multinationals. They need targeted support to implement the inspection and documentation requirements in the Work Plan. NEPC and NAQS could run a focused certification programme for hibiscus exporters in these states to ensure shipments meet Mexican import standards.
Some operators are already moving. In the second half of 2025, a Nigerian agricultural aggregator replaced third-party fumigation with its own warehouse and fumigation facility, eliminating a key compliance bottleneck and offering the service to other exporters. It shows the gap is fixable.
The second is creating structured introductions along the supply chain. Mexican buyers already source through aggregators and are not the bottleneck. The missing link is Nigerian farmers who produce hibiscus but lack visibility into export channels or connections to the aggregators who could move their product. The Nigeria-Mexico Chamber of Commerce, inaugurated in April 2025, could help bridge that.
The third step is straightforward: Nigerian exporters also need a short commercial profile in Spanish outlining price per kilogramme, available volumes, certification status and shipping routes.
The hibiscus situation reflects a broader pattern in Nigeria’s export strategy. Non-oil exports grew by 21 percent in the first half of 2025, reaching $12.8 billion — nearly double the target for that period. The growth is real. But much of it remains concentrated in familiar markets.
Latin America — a market of more than 650 million people — remains largely underdeveloped as a destination for Nigerian exports. Buyer interest exists — Mexico’s two decade-long trading relationship with Nigeria, and its commitment to revive it, make that clear.
Nigeria has the product, the price advantage and a framework to restore the trade. What
is missing is coordination — exporters, regulators and trade institutions moving together rather than in parallel.
The window is still open. But competing exporters are strengthening their supply chains, and the opportunity will not wait. That kind of coordination rarely happens without someone willing to do the connective work — between farmers and aggregators, between exporters and buyers, between two markets that have already proven they can trade.
• Max Bunmi Banjo, PhD, is Managing Director of Puente Nova, a firm focused on strengthening trade and cultural connections between Africa and Latin America. She previously built Google’s Digital Skills for Africa program, which has trained millions across the continent.
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