At Tekedia Capital, we have funded many agro-businesses in Nigeria, including Winich Farms and Vetsark. And in the process of working with these amazing companies, I have learnt one thing: Nigeria’s agro-output is not that bad. What is bad is our capacity to stop wastage in the value chain.
What do I mean? Nigeria does produce a decent amount of tomatoes, yams, etc, but we lose close to 37% (my estimate) of those items. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) puts that number at 50%: “A Food System/Nutrition Specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, Ibrahim Ishaka, has revealed that Nigeria loses around 50 per cent of its agricultural products along the food supply chain. Mr Ishaka disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sidelines of an FAO-organised training in Yola on Saturday.”
So, if you lose 50% of what you produce, you score many own-goals, triggering a situation where farmers are hungry in farming communities. Why is this the case? The typical reason is that we lack adequate storage facilities because we have limited electricity in farming communities.
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In the Igbo Nation, this problem is as old as history with the word “unwu” [seasonal farmine] part of the vocabulary. Unwu is the period between the planting of yam (the king of crops in Igbo mythology) and the harvest period, as during that time, there are limited yams, exacerbated by lack of effective ways to preserve them. In ancestral Igbo, before the advent of packaged food and supermarkets, unwu was famine as the staple food was in short supply. That is why the new yam festival was a big deal then, as it marked the end of the famine period with new yams available.
But why have we not fixed the problem? Of course, we do not have electricity, and most importantly our agriculture policy is heavily planting-focused with limited policies for the harvest time. I have served on the boards of logistics companies and noticed how tomatoes, carrots, etc go to waste simply because trucks are not available to move them to the processing centers or collection areas.
In other words, during the harvest period, the same governments which provided seeds, fertilizers, herbicides, etc do not remember to provide support to farmers. There are about 100,000 active trucks in Nigeria with Dangote Group controlling about 50% of them. The remaining 50k available are not enough for all, and most times farmers are outbid by many FMCGs; Nigeria has no rail cargo system of value.
From my experience, I posit that most farmers intentionally do not want to scale production because of the supply chain challenges. Of course, they cannot own trucks just to use them once per year! If the policy is altered to include the harvest period where governments also make vehicles, etc available with better coordination from farms to factories and markets, we can reduce waste from 50% to less than 10% and that will improve our food availability by an extra 40%.
Our startups have impeccable data to guide this policy formulation in case Nigeria is interested. Together, we can make farmers richer and that will boost output which will help reduce food scarcity.
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When we write and talk about post-harvest losses, they still sound like some new phenomenon, but it has been there for decades. By 2034, we could still be saying the same thing. What do we put our money in and what does development mean to us as a people? No jobs, but yet nothing much is going on in the land. It seems like we derive our satisfaction from regurgitating these mundane issues year after year, with no practical effort to change the trajectory.
The ones we giveaway fertilizers to, have we ever asked them how many tons of food they produced from the free or subsidized fertilizers and how they were used or sold? Our very existence is a monumental disappointment to sane humans. No excuses.