Stakeholders in the agriculture sector, especially the tomato segment, have tasked the Federal Government to encourage potential investors in opening tomato processing plants to curb losing over 60 per cent of farmers’ harvests.
An Executive Director, Institute for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Kaduna State, Prof. Ibrahim Abubakar, explained that the best way to curb excess waste of the food item was to offer incentives like low-interest rate fund to private investors to open processing plant factory in the country, for them to process tomatoes into juice or store the product in plastic bags.
He said, “This will assist our farmers to reap from the benefit of the processing plant; reduce the loss acquired from rotten tomatoes and by so doing, help the economy of the country.
“The government should encourage the use of cold storage valve for the transportation of tomato. If tomatoes are transported in a cold storage valve, just like meats are being transported, they can reach their destination without having any significant deterioration in quality and this will reduce the losses of farmers.”
According to him, the lack of storage facilities is accounting for significant yield losses to farmers in the country, which amount to billions of naira.
For a perishable crop like tomato, about 50 to 60 per cent of farm produce is lost as it cannot be stored easily, because when tomatoes are harvested, they have to be marketed and consumed immediately.
He added, “In the North, genetics have been wiped off due to lack of storage facilities; abysmal is very high because the farmers record high losses. At the height of its season, there is a lot of tomatoes but sometimes, there is no market and tomatoes cannot be stored.
“The only way to store tomato is to process it into juice and store it or dry it but the way farmers dry tomatoes are usually not hygienic, because they dry them by the roadside.
“Presently, in IAR, we are making the solar dryers available to small-scale farmers so that during the period of excess harvest, they use it to cut and dry their tomatoes. Though lots of consumers of tomato are not assisting this technology, especially in Lagos, people prefer fresh tomatoes to dried ones but in the North, quite a number of people eat dry
tomato.”
The Secretary, Tomato Sellers Association, Mile 12 Market, the largest crop market in Nigeria, Alhaji Amadu Ibrahim, explained that during the transit of tomatoes from Kano, Zaria and Katsina, different hazards occur, which lead to reduction in the quality of the crop.
He said, “Sometimes, one gains and sometimes loss is incurred, but the major problem complained by farmers is the lack of means of preserving their tomatoes during dry season when we have them in abundance. This also affects the market as it can sell between N8,000 and N12,000 per basket, depending on the quality of the tomatoes, compared to N5,000 or N4,000 during its season.”
A small-scale farmer in Ikire area in Osun State, Mr. Ojo Adewole, lamented that preserving his tomatoes was difficult because they were like water and could not be preserved for long.
This, according to him, affects his income as the produce from his farm are more than the demand from the market and this results in majority of the produce getting spoilt as there are no major ways of preserving them.
He said, “This has really discouraged me from planting tomato in a large scale, as was my plan earlier, before going into farming. Government should provide a company that can buy the tomatoes and drain them so that farmers will not always be at the losing end.”
