The Central Bank of Nigeria has revealed that the country spent $160m from its foreign exchange on food importation in January.

According to figures obtained from CBN’s economic report on ‘Sectoral utilisation of foreign exchange’ for January showed that this was lower than $310m spent in December.

The report reads: ‘“Total foreign exchange utilisation by sectors decreased by 40.3 percent from the preceding month to $2.75bn, reflecting a drop in end-user demand for foreign exchange, owing to year-end ease in economic activities.

“Visible and invisible imports, constituting 46.9 percent and 53.1 percent of the total foreign exchange utilisation declined by 53.4 percent and 20.7 percent to $0.77bn and $0.87bn respectively.

“A disaggregation of foreign exchange utilisation for visible transactions showed that the amount utilised for industrial, manufactured products, and food products sub-sectors amounted to $0.30bn, $0.23bn, and $0.16bn respectively, relative to $0.72bn, $0.38bn, and $0.31bn in the preceding month.

“Also, oil, transport, agriculture, and mineral subsectors amounted to $0.05bn, $0.02bn, $0.008bn, and $0.006bn, respectively, in January 2021, compared with $0.15bn, $0.05bn, $0.02bn, and $0.02bn in December 2020.”

A disaggregation of the foreign exchange utilisation for invisible transactions showed that financial services stood at $0.81bn and accounted for 49.3 per cent of the total.

Also, the share of other sectors were business services, $14.91m (0.9 per cent); educational services, $26.44m (1.6 per cent); health related, $0.14m (0.01 per cent); transport services, $12.97m (0.8 per cent); and communication services, $1.78m (0.1 per cent) while other services not included elsewhere received $6.73m (0.4 per cent).