The oil palm grows wild from Senegal to Angola but its highest natural concentration is in the rainforest belt of southern Nigeria — Edo, Delta, Imo, Abia, Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Cross River. Archaeological evidence at Igbo-Ukwu places palm-oil use in the region at least to the 9th century CE.
For centuries palm oil — *mmanu nri* among the Igbo, *epo pupa* among the Yoruba — lit shrines, sealed marriages, anointed kings, and cooked nearly every soup south of the Niger-Benue line. The hard palm-kernel oil was a skin emollient and the fuel for the small clay lamps that burned in every compound at night.
## The Atlantic transformation (1807 onwards)
Two forces fused. The British industrial revolution needed vegetable oil — to lubricate steam mills, tin-plate iron, and make the Pears' soap that washed industrial Britain. And the 1807 abolition of the slave trade left the slave kingdoms of Bonny, Opobo and Calabar searching for a replacement export. By the 1850s the Niger Delta was exporting more than 30,000 tonnes of palm oil a year, and the Liverpool and Bristol supercargoes — Macgregor Laird, the Royal Niger Company under George Goldie — ran the trade through King Pepple of Bonny, King Jaja of Opobo and the Itsekiri trade-king Nanna Olomu. See Bonny & Opobo, Royal Niger Company charter, Nanna Olomu.
## 1960: world leadership; 2025: net importer
In 1960 Nigeria produced 43% of the world's palm oil and was the largest exporter on earth. By 2024 Nigeria produced under 2% of global output and was a net importer, behind Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Colombia — the collapse traced in Dutch Disease & the Death of Agriculture. The Malaysian palm-oil industry, founded in 1917 with seedlings taken from the colonial-era Calabar nursery, now produces twenty times what Nigeria produces from the same parent stock.
## The Terrible Twins — F.O.O.D in palm oil
The Fourth-Republic palm-oil sector is one of the textbook F.O.O.D cases — Favoured Operators Operating Domestically, protected by tariffs and import bans, with no innovation pressure. Two firms — Okomu Oil Palm and Presco — dominate the listed Nigerian segment and together with a handful of plantations control most of the visible market. Refined vegetable oil sits on the non-ECOWAS import prohibition list. Crude palm oil carries a 35% import duty (trimmed to 28.75% in the April 2026 tariff review, after the firms had pre-empted the gazette by taking to the newspapers to warn of "doom" if imports came in unchecked).
Feyi Fawehinmi's Terrible Twins of Palm Oil is unsparing: the protected operators "cannot even be bothered to change the eyesore packaging in which they sell their products." Twenty years of tariff and FX protection have produced shareholder returns, not technological progress. The USDA's 2024 oilseeds report noted that significant black-market palm-oil inflows already came through neighbouring countries to evade the duty.
## What the 2026 review actually said
The April 2026 Fiscal Policy Measures cut crude palm oil duty from 35% to 28.75% — directionally sound but small. Refined oil stays banned. The reading in Some F.O.O.D For Thought: the cut is best read as an admission of domestic shortfall rather than a real opening — the logic is still "let the feedstock in, reserve the refining for local players."
The lesson the F.O.O.D series draws from palm oil is the lesson cement teaches and the lesson the Dangote Refinery is about to teach in petrol: once an industry is constructed behind a tariff wall, it calcifies. The favoured operators learn to defend the wall, not to build the next factory.