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Farmers avoiding crop after pests ravaged last year’s produce
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Factory expected to resume in July when tomato supply improves
- By Bloomberg
Thousands of farmers in northern Nigeria contracted to grow tomatoes for a set price are shunning the crop this season after pests destroyed much of last year’s produce, leaving the processing factory set up by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, short of raw materials.
Established to process 1,200 metric tons of tomatoes each day and produce 400,000 tons of paste annually, the Dangote Farms Ltd. factory, just outside the northern city of Kano, was designed to meet Nigeria’s domestic needs and help cut paste imports of 300,000 tons a year from China. It was expected to help put to better use the 900,000 tons of tomatoes that rot as waste annually out of Nigeria’s yearly harvest of about 1.5 million tons.
“We don’t have enough supply,” Kaita said in a May 15 interview in his office, explaining why the factory had to shut. “We are hoping to reopen when we get the supplies that meet our demand.”
Mixed Cropping
The factory started operations in March last year, producing at full capacity, before closing a month later as the crop losses took their toll. Since then it has operated in fits and starts, working last between February and March, said Kaita.
Across the country the price of tomatoes has jumped, rising as much as threefold in some parts, on the impact of the pest described locally as the “tomato ebola,” according to a survey of buyers. Nigeria registered a 17.2 percent inflation rate in April from the previous year, with food prices appreciating 19.3 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday.
The National Horticultural Research Institute in Kano is urging farmers to protect their tomato crop by using lamps at night to attract the pests to water-filled trays.
“A lot of farmers producing tomatoes every year ran away from the crop this season,” Abubakar Hamishu, a research officer at the institute said in an interview. The organization is promoting this method of pest control, “which is affordable, to help the farmers,” he said.
Musa Alasan, who grew tomatoes on his 7-acre (2.8-hectare) farm, allocated only one acre for the crop this year while planting wheat on the rest.
“I lost almost everything, so I was really afraid to plant tomatoes again,” he said by phone from his farm in Samawa, near Kano. “I know a lot of our friends who used to grow tomatoes but this year they didn’t, while others who did mixed it with other crops.”