By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Each year, Nigeria loses 900,000 tonnes of tomato due to a lack of storage and processing facilities, but instead of fixing the problem, imports 1.3 million tonnes – 300,000 tonnes from China alone – which depletes foreign reserves by $350 million.
Now, the problem has got worse because Islamist jihadists prevent farmers up North from cultivating crops by destroying farms with their cattle, killing farmers, and kidnapping some for ransom.
So Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, cannot get enough supply for his tomato factory that can process 1,200 tonnes per day.
Bloomberg reports that the tomato factory – the biggest on the continent – produces one-fifth of its capacity, as farmers still able to farm lack resources for large scale cultivation in the face of overwhelming national demand.
The factory, a subsidiary of Dangote Farms, is located in Kadawa on the outskirts of Kano. It was launched in March 2016 with the grand ambition to expand production and wean Nigeria off tomato paste imports.
The plant idled in 2017 after a pest plague consumed plantations of tomato, and resumed production in 2019 after a payment dispute with farmers was resolved.
“We haven’t been able to process enough quantity of tomato to make our operations successful,” Dangote Tomatoes Processing Plant Managing Director, Abdulkarim Kaita, told Bloomberg.
“At the moment, we are counting losses,” he said.
Bloomberg adds that tomato farming provides about 200,000 jobs in Nigeria but lenders do not see giving loans to farmers as bankable even though Abuja priorities domestic food production.
Policy slips, graft pandemic, and ethnic conflicts keep investors away, worsening the labour crisis in an economy that has one of the worst unemployment rates in the world.
Even the majority of farmers still working the land live far away in villages, making it hard for vehicles to convey tomatoes to the factory.
“Our production demand has not been met so far and we need to increase the volume of supply from the farmers,” Kaita said.
Dangote factory seeks ban on tomato imports
Nigeria produces about 2.3 million tonnes of tomato a year but, due to poor roads and storage facilities, much of them rot before they get to the market.
The country imports about 1.3 million tonnes of the red vegetable, mostly from China and other Asia countries. Nigeria is the third largest importer of tomato in Africa, per Nairametrics.
In 2019, Kaita urged the federal government to ban tomato imports in order to sustain the new quest for local farm produce consumption and export.
THISDAY reported that he sought a total ban on the importation of fresh and processed tomatoes because the Dangote plant has the capacity to produce for both domestic and exports markets.
He cited a new investment in the factory that would increase the production of fresh and processed tomato and end importation of the crop, which costs Nigeria $350 million yearly.
“Just as it has been done in the case of rice, Nigeria will soon become a net exporter of the commodity,” Kaita enthused.
He said the plant would make Nigeria self-sufficient in tomato production as it had established a N3 billion Green House nursery in Kano to process between 300 and 350 million tonnes of hybrid tomato seedlings.
“The management of Dangote Tomatoes Processing Limited, which is a subsidiary of Dangote Farms, is excited to reveal the tremendous effort that we are making to ensure that Nigeria becomes self-sufficient in tomato production.
“The planting medium you are looking at is called PAT MOOSE which has the capacity of producing 350 million seedlings per season that can be used to plant an estimated 12,000 hectares of tomato farm.
“We are glad to disclose that we are the first to bring this new technology into the country and this is going to fast track the yield of our tomato farmers tremendously.
“The project is being executed under the CBN [Central Bank of Nigeria] Tomato Anchor-Borrowers Programme. The CBN will be paying for the seedling that we are cultivating, and it will be distributed to farmers.”
