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| Fresh ripe tomatoes |
“Nigeria is one of the largest consumer of tomato in the world” that has been said by various analyst world over. I don’t need an analyst to tell me that because I know that in Nigeria we eat just about everything with tomato. All our stews, soups and sauces in every corner of Nigeria includes tomato.
We use tomatoes for salads, to fry omelettes,
sandwiches and various other dishes. If you are like my husband or my father,
you also eat tomato raw (yuk) like you eat an apple or any fruit.
Tomatoes can be cultivated anywhere across
Nigeria, and this is because our tropical condition is favourable to the
survival of tomatoes. There are many varieties of tomato but the greater part
of tomato production in Nigeria is undertaken in the North of the country.
Kaduna, Kano, Jigawa, Katsina, Sokoto, Plateau and Bauchi states. Although the
Southern states also grow commercial quantity the variety grown is not as dry or
large as that of the North.
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| Tomatoes as sold in Mile 12 Market, Lagos |
In Lagos, most of our tomatoes and other fresh
farm produce are supplied by the North. All the items are transported by road
in cane baskets stacked on each other, by the time the produce gets to the
market half of it is rotten.
From the farm an average basket can cost about
N300 by the time it gets to Mile 12 market it can sell from about N3000 to N20,000
depending on the season and that includes the rotten, ungraded pieces.
Early this year, a basket of tomato in Lagos
was sold for about N3,000; today in July we bought the same basket for N15,000.
Last week it was N20,000.
There are two major reasons for the
increase in price, 1. The season, 2. The unrest in the North.
Regardless of these reasons, we need to
find a way to preserve our tomatoes. It is ridiculous to buy a basket of tomato
about 40kg for N3000 then 6 months later that same tomato is sold for N20,000. When
I know that two thirds of the tomatoes from the farm go to waste because of
poor standards of harvesting, storage, transportation and preservation.
Nigeria produces 1.5 million tons of tomatoes
annually of which about 900,000 tons rot, Agriculture Minister Akinwunmi
Adesina said at a June 13 presentation in the capital, Abuja in 2013.
Nigeria is one of the biggest importers of
tomato paste. We import tomato paste from Europe, Canada and China. Yet our own
tomato belt is filled with rotten tomatoes. Ludicrous!
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| Imported Canned Tomatoes - Soon to be produced in Nigeria |
In 2013, the Central Bank and Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, teamed up to
establish a $25 million tomato-paste factory in Kano. The intervention by the Central
Bank of Nigeria, which commissioned a study to show that processing local
tomatoes is cheaper than importing paste from China, is part of the
government’s drive to cut annual food imports of more than $10 billion.
I am happy with this huge investment in
tomato preservation in Nigeria but my worry is if the factory will cater to
local consumption or exports. The factory has a capacity of about 400,000
tonnes of tomato-paste annually for a market demand of 900,000 tonnes annually.
In another news, I read that Thomas Canning
of Maidstone, Ontario Canada, has signed a $25-million tomato product deal with
a Nigerian company, Festrut Group. The tomatoes will be grown in Leamington,
Ontario, the tomato capital of Canada, and canned in nearby Maidstone, before
being shipped overseas to Nigeria.
So as one rich man is helping local farmers
preserve, maximize their profit and also feed Nigerians, another rich man is
spending the same amount of money to help foreign farmers, save their jobs and
feed Nigerians in the process. ummm Issokay…
I’m in support of preserving local produce
and drastically reducing price of local fresh farm produce in the market place.
At a period like this when the price of tomato is like that of gold, my retail customers
prefer imported canned whole tomatoes. The wholesale customers like Hotels,
Restaurants and Eateries have no choice but to buy the fresh tomatoes but this drastically
cuts into their profit as they can’t be expected to change their selling prices
seasonally.
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| Diced Bottled Tomatoes - Another form of preservation |
It is very sad because I know that if
Nigerians can preserve the tomatoes during the season when it is cheap either canned
whole or paste we would drop our domestic consumption price by more than half and
that applies to many of our fresh foods especially during off season. This will
also reduce our dependence on imports. We can do this successfully without
resulting in banning. (I do not like banning of any sort, I’d rather we improve
our local practices to meet up with our foreign competitors).
Investing in various fresh food preservation methods is a
good way to help everyone save money; it is also a good way to help our local
farmers maximize their profit and reduce their farm waste. In a country where
the poor are over 70% of the population this has to be number one on any
transformation agenda.
