Nigeria, which suffers from food shortages, loses tonnes of various types of foods to post-harvest losses.
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A pick-up van carrying farm produce breaks down along Osogbo-Iwo Road in Osun State. PREMIUM TIMES/Oladeinde Olawoyin “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.
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.
The 2023 Global Hunger Index 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. “That low levels of education and lack of market access lead to higher post-harvest losses suggests that policy interventions outside the agricultural sector are needed. Improving access to markets and encouraging farmers to continue secondary schooling will reduce food waste in the long run,” the World Bank said.
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.
A signpost indicating the Dangote Tomato Processing Plant site at Kadawa, Kano State. PREMIUM TIMES/Abdulkareem Mojeed 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. 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.
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. “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.
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.
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. “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.”
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