INVESTIGATION: Nigeria’s food crisis festers amid large-scale post-harvest losses (I)

There was no telling that day that the large dispatch of newly harvested onions from Kano, the commercial hub of Nigeria’s agrarian north, to the southernmost city of Port Harcourt on the edge of the Atlantic was all a labour at nothing.

Bala Alo, 60, born into the onion trade and now the custodian of a legacy business that has survived a generation down the family line, rose before dawn to prepare a truckload of produce destined for the Rivers State capital.

It was early 2013 in the middle of a harvest glut when, as it sometimes plays out, an abundance of produce brought its sorrow: more distress than delight for some farmers and traders who, overwhelmed with so much to handle and manage, were struggling to count their losses.

The truck travelled from Kano through other parts of the north, headed for more than a thousand kilometres under a sweltering heat. It broke down abruptly somewhere on the way, and a major mechanical fault kept it rooted in the spot.

A pick-up van carrying farm produce breaks down along Osogbo-Iwo Road in Osun State. PREMIUM TIMES/Oladeinde Olawoyin

Days already spent lumbering through the trip, with the tightly loaded purple onions at its back exposed to the elements, were elongated by the additional time it took to put the vehicle back in shape.

By the time it reached its buyer, the vegetable was rotten beyond measure and what was recovered was bought for as little as N2,000.

Mr Alo, who grows and sells onions, has limited storage space to keep the excess for the season when the vegetable is in short supply.

“The way I will rejoice in abundance, and when I make a profit, that’s how I will equally feel bad when I lose too,” he told PREMIUM TIMES in February.

“That’s the nature of the business, and we have been used to it since childhood,” he added, hinting at the necessity of sustaining a long-standing family tradition as a factor that helped him to soldier through.

Over a decade after the incident, Mr Alo continues to record post-harvest losses as an absence of storage facilities leaves his produce at the mercy of spoilage, just like several other farmers across Nigeria battling the bugbear.

In multiple interviews with PREMIUM TIMES between February and April, farmers lamented that such losses are sharply eroding the income of smallholders, who make up more than 80 per cent of Nigeria’s agriculture labour force.

The woe of the farmer-cum-trader mirrors the scale of the food waste of a nation so long accustomed to a culture of negligence that makes roughly half of its farmers’ produce decay every year after harvest.

ActionAid, an international charity that focuses on tackling global poverty and injustice in 44 countries plus the Arab Region, estimates Nigeria’s annual post-harvest losses at N3.5 trillion. That is about the same as last year’s combined value of the country’s imported and exported agricultural goods, which reached N3.53 trillion.

Given its vast food wastage, the notion that Nigeria is a consuming nation at heart might need to be revised. Significant amounts of vegetables and fruits are wasted in the country. The trend also manifests across grains, tubers, oil palms, and fishery, with the drivers being as basic as traders’ failure to obtain parasols to shield perishables from direct sunlight at produce markets.

PREMIUM TIMES’ investigations across nine agrarian states found underinvestment in food preservation technology and modern storage facilities, absence of market access, poor produce handling and broad knowledge gap among farmers as critical factors inhibiting Nigeria’s food security and export potential.

These factors have also made most farmers incapable of earning returns commensurate with their output.

Beyond the continued loss of money that the mostly poor smallholders dominating Nigeria’s farming workforce could have used to better their lot, post-harvest losses continue to cost the country dearly by heightening its food crisis. Last July, newly-inaugurated President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency on food production.

The 2023 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report ranked Nigeria 109th out of 125 countries tracked for their hunger levels. “With a score of 28.3 in the 2023 Global Hunger Index, Nigeria has a level of hunger that is serious,” GHI said on its website.

If the number of Nigerians likely to encounter extreme hunger in the near term is considered, the adversity becomes more urgent and gloomier.

From June through August, the population of those facing acute hunger in Africa’s biggest country could swell by 42.5 per cent compared to last year, based on the World Food Programme’s reckoning, bringing the total estimate of food-insecure persons so far this year to 26.5 million.

A paradox of plenty, northern Nigeria, which produces the bulk of the country’s food and is a big driver of its post-harvest losses, is on course to be hit worst by the impending hunger crisis. The region is made especially vulnerable by the teeming number of those displaced by a long-standing insurgency and other geo-political conflicts in its eastern part.

“That low levels of education and lack of market access lead to higher post-harvest losses (other things constant) suggests that policy interventions outside the agricultural sector are needed. Improving access to markets and encouraging farmers (or their children) to continue secondary schooling will reduce food waste in the long run,” the World Bank said.

Tomatoes

In one of the best-known efforts to abate national wastage in tomato production, Africa’s wealthiest person, Aliko Dangote, started a 1,200-tonne-per-day factory in Kadawa, Kano State, in 2016.

Essentially, the initiative was a rescue mission that considered the most perishable Nigerian food in terms of volume and shelf life.

The idea was for the factory to offtake from farmers 900,000 tonnes of tomatoes wasted each year after harvest so that importing 300,000 tonnes of processed tomatoes from China could easily be averted in the march towards national self-sufficiency.

The plant has fought many outages and setbacks to stay alive, including the raw material upheaval caused by a tomato plague in seven states in the north in the first year of its operation.

Known as tuta absoluta in botany but widely called “tomato ebola” by farmers and locals after the unprecedented ruin the ebola virus wrought in West Africa earlier in the decade, a breakout of the disease led to a 90 per cent national tomato production loss at a point in the crisis. Prices soared five times shortly afterwards.

The Rockefeller Foundation-supported YieldWise, which partnered with Dangote Tomato Processing Company to set up an out-grower scheme to provide smallholders in the region access to a ready, year-round market, noted that several other similar factories went under.

Due to protracted difficulties in sourcing the feedstock, manufacturing activities at the facility have been stalled for years.

A large signboard with flaking paintwork and patches of rust at the fringe, alone in the heat and dust of a scorched expanse, was the only clear indicator that a factory had ever been there during PREMIUM TIMES’ visit in February.

A signpost indicating the Dangote Tomato Processing Plant site at Kadawa, Kano State. PREMIUM TIMES/Abdulkareem Mojeed

In Jos, the capital city of a major Nigerian tomato-producing state, Plateau, farmers and traders said the prospect of making a profit from the business is 50-50, given the complexity of the trade.

Chimezie Awuzie, a produce trader at the city’s Farin Gada market, said using lorries to transport tomatoes, the most popular conveyance, compounds the risk.

“If one breaks, it can affect other ones,” he said, alluding to the damage bruised and infected tomatoes can cause to others.

For that reason, local traders sort decaying tomatoes as a self-help technique for moderating losses when sending the vegetable via road to other parts of the country.

One big practice is to pick the tomatoes when they are not yet ripe so they can stand a chance of arriving fresh at large urban markets in the south, considering that spending days in the heat of travel through Nigeria’s torrid north could ripen them considerably. Mr Awuzie couldn’t assure that baskets of already red, crispy tomatoes on the market floor would arrive in Lagos, for instance, still fresh after a road trip of 959 kilometres.

Somewhere in an open space in the wet market, a young man hunched over baskets of tomatoes covered with layers of brown paper. He was twining the produce further with strings.

Tomatoes packed in raffia baskets are firmly held with twines and covered with brown papers at Farin Gada Market in Jos, ready to be transported to Enugu in South-eastern Nigeria. PREMIUM TIMES/Ronald Adamolekun

The tomatoes were bound for Enugu in the South-east, and they had been packed tightly, apparently with the understanding that the papers would shield them from adverse weather. In contrast, they raise the risk of exposure to heat, a poor handling practice fuelling wastage.

The trader mentioned widely accepted raffia baskets, cheaper but less safe than reusable plastic crates (RPCs), as a source of bother that is stoking losses for traders.

Tomatoes packed in ventilated plastic crates and raffia baskets at Farin Gada Market in Jos. PREMIUM TIMES/Ronald Adamolekun

The convenience of stacking the crates, which, unlike raffia baskets, can be piled on one another without crushing the produce, has been internationally observed as a simple, non-sophisticated way of reducing wastage in the tomato supply chain.

However, they are in short supply, and farmers see their higher cost rather than the difference RPCs can make in boosting their income. Mr Awuzie noted that the crates are manufactured in a few big cities like Lagos, which implies that they become expensive for users in other parts of the country.

Mohammed Salasi, the project coordinator of HortiNigeria, an initiative seeking to improve smallholders’ social capital and empowerment, said at a national tomato stakeholder workshop in Abuja last February that 60 million plastic crates are required to replace raffia baskets, with just 300,000 RPCs currently available.

The modest progress made in curbing tomato wastage through stackable crates owed its debt to the Post-harvest Loss Alliance for Nutrition (PLAN) project, which was launched in Nigeria eight years ago. It is backed by the Geneva-based Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).

Attributing post-harvest losses in fresh fruits and vegetables mainly to a shortfall in cold chain technology, proper packaging/crating and processing technologies/facilities, the scheme claimed to have invested in 17,000 RPCs and influenced the buying and deploying of more than 120,000 units.

“An independent assessment revealed that some PLAN Nigeria members saw a reduction in post-harvest losses of tomatoes from 35-40 per cent to below 10 per cent after adopting RPCs,” according to an impact document on the PLAN project in Nigeria published by GAIN.

“In Nigeria, 40–50 per cent of fresh fruits and vegetables are lost during crating, transportation, storage, and processing,” Nutrition Connect, an initiative of GAIN, observed.

Farmers have no proven methods of scaling down spoilage, Atiku, who supplies tomatoes to retailers in Jos, said.

“Very unfortunately, we don’t have any preserving method,” the middle-aged man said, adding that the immensity of the post-harvest losses in tomato farming put off many youths who would have staked money in the business.

Kojo Funa, who grows tomatoes and green vegetables on various parcels of land at Jos city centre, said the belief in northern Nigerian that “you can’t get more than fate has destined you to have” has conditioned smallholders, particularly tomato farmers, to accept post-harvest losses as inevitable to their business, one factor he said made many to see spending on preservation as a waste of resources.

During a glut, the young man grinds his unsold tomatoes with onions and other ingredients and boils the paste to preserve it. He drains the water, packs the paste in airtight containers, and sells it to consumers who use it to prepare stew. Mr Funa said the puree could last for six months.

Tomatrix Nigeria, established in 2019 by Cornell University Nigerian scholar John Babadara, is taking the innovation further. Based in Katsina, northern Nigeria, the company blends tomatoes, onions, and pepper and packs them in containers similar to jam jars.

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Tomatrix said it onboarded 125 smallholders and prevented 90,000 metric tonnes of tomato from post-harvest losses.

“Our agro-processing hub is strategically designed to address the requirements of small-scale tomato farmers and local consumers, ensuring access to high-quality, consistent, and nutritious tomato products,” the company said on its website.

“Through our value-addition approach and distribution networks, we combat post-harvest loss within the tomato value chains.”

Tomatrix is working with experts at Cornell Agritech’s Food Venture Center and New York State Center of Excellence for Food and Agriculture to deploy technologies and solutions to tackle post-harvest losses among rural farmers.

Tomato farmers interviewed by PREMIUM TIMES said no tomato paste factory offtakes from them, stressing that the sheer weight of loss after harvest rests on farmers.

Farmers in Plateau State take excesses from states like Sokoto and Zamfara, where the climate is far hotter, to sun-dry to minimise waste.

During PREMIUM TIMES’ visit to Kura and Garun Mallam, local government areas in Kano State, sliced tomatoes at different stages of desiccation were directly spread across an area of eroded soil as farmers and traders cut thousands of baskets of the produce that could not be sold into flat pieces to dry them.

Unsold tomatoes sliced and sun-dried on bare ground in Kano. PREMIUM TIMES/Abdulkareem Mojeed

“When we don’t get buyers, we get a tarred place, cut the tomatoes and dry them, then store them in sacks,” said Nuhu Abubakar, a farmer and produce trader at Chunko Market, Kokami, Katsina State.

“But during the rainy season, we sell them at lower prices. If there are no buyers, we take them to Kano or Kaduna and sell for any price.”

This preservation method has sparked health concerns, with grains of sand often found in desiccated tomatoes. Their exposure to flies and other airborne contaminants while sun-drying the vegetable further raises health risks.

“We have 75 per cent wastage in tomatoes in the state,” Aondongu Saaku, the chairman of All Farmers Association of Nigeria in Benue State, the country’s famed food basket, told PREMIUM TIMES.

“That makes farmers not to even look for improved seeds. They go on the local ones” to minimise costs, he added.

The local breed, the most widely cultivated type in the country, is more prone to post-harvest losses than the improved/hybrid variety called UTC tomato, which is firmer and has a longer shelf life, making it the preferred choice of tomato paste companies. Farmers say the hybrid type can withstand the pressure of travel.

This is the first of a two-part series. The Centre for Journalism, Innovation, and Development (CJID) supported this reporting project.