Nigeria loses about half of its perishable export goods yearly due to a dearth of cold chain technology at airports, according to the African Centre for Supply Chain.
This is the third part in our series on post-harvest losses in Nigeria. Read the first part here and the second part here.
"You will see for yourself when you get there," Veronica Igbana, the director of Agricultural Extension and Risk Management, Benue State Bureau of Agricultural Development and Management, said after a conversation with PREMIUM TIMES in the presence of her colleagues in her Makurdi office in February.
Earlier on, her colleague Timothy Atser remarked, "If you just go to my local government, you will begin to cry. You will see farmers harvesting their oranges and pouring them away because they want new ones to grow because no one is to buy and people will come and price it at N1000 per bag."
Nigeria's orange production touched 4.2 million tonnes in 2022, the same year it spent $5.1 million importing citrus fruits.
Benue State produces more oranges than any other state in the country.
Along the long road from Utange through Waapera to Lessel in Ushongo Local Government Area, during PREMIUM TIMES visit in February, orange trees lined the dusty stretch on both sides, with dense yellow fruits hanging feebly from the branches, waiting to drop and rot away.
The numerous fruits on most of the trees gave travellers and passers-by an impression of waste, not abundance.
Kilometre after kilometre, the heavy presence of orange trees in front of virtually all the houses and on farmlands suggests they have been grown purposefully to adorn the cheap mud houses rather than to earn income for farmers and homeowners.
At Ikyobo village in the local government area, Atsaga Anenbe owns more than 10,000 orange trees in orchards on 215 hectares, where he also grows yam and soybean.
"I am not getting anything from oranges," he told PREMIUM TIMES. "Up till now, they are buying a bag for N1000," he added, noting that no juice factory offtakes from him.
Mr Anenbe said the massive output is a burden in itself, as he sometimes hires labourers to strip the orange trees of their fruits so that new ones can sprout.
"The losses here are massive. Of the stands that are over 10,000, over half is wasted," said Aondongu Saaku, chairman of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, Benue State chapter.
"They need orange-processing equipment to do concentrates, to do juice," in order to reduce the loss, he added. "This local government is covered with so many oranges. They need a factory."
In May 2011, Teragro Commodities Limited, the agribusiness subsidiary of Lagos-listed conglomerate Transnational Corporation of Nigeria, leased the moribund Benfruit Concentrate Processing Plant, owned by the Benue State Government, for ten years.
Teragro invested about N1 billion within the first year of running the plant, which was overhauled to process orange juice and mango puree, the first-of-its-kind fruit juice concentrate plant in the country.
Part of the motivation was the overabundance of the two fruits in Benue, which produces oranges and mangoes more than any other Nigerian state. The company said seven of the 12 orange varieties are available in the state.
With a 26,500 metric-tonne production input capacity of oranges per annum at the time, Teragro was hoping to increase the size of the plant four-fold within two to three years, with plans to offtake the fruits from farmers. Teragro also processed pineapple concentrate and orange-peel oil for industrial markets.
In April 2015, Teragro agreed with the Benue State Government to lease land in the Ushongo Local Government Area to produce oranges, which would supply feedstock to the concentrate plant in Makurdi.
It hit a milestone in September of that year when the Coca-Cola company contracted the firm as the sole local-concentrate sourcing partner for its newly launched Five Alive Pulpy Orange.
Teragro announced its plan to quit the business about three years later, noting it decided to exit after "a careful review of the long-term proposition of its play in the juice concentrate market revealed a number of issues."
Adim Jibunoh, the then president/CEO of Transcorp Plc, said at an investor conference that one of the factors that informed Teragro's decision was the lack of government protection for domestic manufacturers, notably the fact that the business had to compete with cheaper concentrate brands from abroad.
"If we continue (with Teragro), we would be a loss-making business. It's a buyer's market because buyers (and not sellers) dictate the price," he said.
No fewer than seven state-owned agro-processing enterprises (including Benfruit Nigeria Limited) have been listed for privatisation by the Benue State Council on Privatisation on the Benue State Planning Commission website.
The pattern exists in other Nigerian states which offer public-private partnerships.
"States should concentrate more on small modular processing and storage facilities in communities based on different commodities," ActionAid said
"This should be a good approach to reducing our post-harvest losses, as the larger Staple Crops Agro-Processing Zones (SCPZ) are most likely not to reach remote areas," it added.
ActionAid is betting that states will be better positioned to increase their internally generated revenue (IGR) and speed up their economic growth if they commit more to addressing post-harvest losses.
The organisation estimated that the average post-harvest loss per state in 2022 was over five times higher than the biggest state (Lagos) budget for agriculture and roughly 43 times more than the smallest state (Ekiti) budget for agriculture that year.
The absence of government support is increasingly constraining Nigeria's food export potential, with the country losing half of its perishable export goods yearly due to a dearth of cold chain technology at airports, according to the African Centre for Supply Chain. Nigeria is ranked 88th of 139 countries on the world's Logistics Performance Index.
According to SBM Intelligence, an Africa-focused market/security intelligence-gathering company, 47 per cent of Nigerian farmers have no access whatsoever to storage facilities to preserve their produce during harvest.
Access is weaker for female smallholders, with ActionAid reckoning that storage facilities are available to only 18 per cent of them in Nigeria.
Many of the farmers and traders interviewed by PREMIUM TIMES cited a lack of access roads from farms among the factors fuelling post-harvest losses in the country.
Musibau Ajagbe, a road transport worker in Iwo, Osun State, identified the commonest cause of post-harvest losses as the poor state of roads linking farm settlements to the major markets in the area. According to him, many of the roads are dilapidated, with attendant impact on vehicles and farm produce.
Mr Ajagbe, who plies the road from Iwo to Ife-Odan and Ogbomoso, explained that some portions of the road were constructed several decades ago and have long been abandoned by the government after years of decay.
"Many of our people (fellow drivers) travel to farm settlements along Ife-Odan to other parts of the border communities along Oyo-Ogbomoso Road and you need to see the state of those roads. Many times, our vehicles break down along the road, and bananas and vegetables get spoiled due to the poor condition of the road," he said.
Sadia Abebi, one of the roadside traders along the road, explained that it is common to find drivers struggling to fix their vehicles along the road because of the poor condition of the roads leading to the farming communities.
"The roads leading to many of the farms are bad and, every day, farmers, off-takers and drivers lament the situation, which even leads to losses for some of them," she said.
"The reason is that once they can't take their fruits and vegetables out to town or markets on time, it may lose value or go bad in the bush."
Farmers, traders and drivers in places like Ilaro, Makurdi, Jos, Kano and Kaduna have also complained about the impact of bad roads and government neglect.
At a press briefing arranged by ActionAid Nigeria, Small-scale Women Farmers Organisation in Nigeria and Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development in Abuja last December to review Nigeria's 2024 proposed budget for agriculture, officials of the organisations emphasised the urgency for both federal and state governments to significantly invest in rural roads to boost the transportation of agriculture produce and trade.
"The allocations to post-harvest losses should urgently focus on supporting small cottage processing and storage facilities in communities based on different commodities to be owned, operated, sustained, and expanded by smallholder women farmers cooperatives. This will help address the challenges of post-harvest losses experienced by smallholder women farmers across Nigeria," they said.
"Solar dryers should also be provided to smallholder women farmers cooperatives in communities based on agriculture produce that can be dried to save losses," they added.
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The review spotlighted post-harvest loss reduction supports (storage facilities, processing facilities, market access, trainings, etc) as part of the strategic areas the N100 billion allocation for capital expenditure for the National Agricultural Development Fund should target to help achieve the commitments in President Tinubu's declaration of state of emergency on food security in the country.
Scholars Funmilola Adekeye-Bolarin and Bosa S.O. have emphasised the imperative for the government to invest more in post-harvest research and take road construction and fixing of dilapidated roads in rural areas more seriously to ease transportation of agricultural produce.
In their article titled "Post Harvest Losses: A Dilemma in Ensuring Food Security in Nigeria," published in Journal of Natural Sciences Research, the two researchers from the National Centre for Agricultural Mechanization, Ilorin also stressed the need to involve agriculture extension officers in the government's post-harvest management plan.
"The local government is closer to the farmer and so should be in the forefront in preventing losses by promoting the maintenance of food stocks at household and enterprise levels," the scholars said.
According to Offiong Offor, the Akwa Ibom State commissioner for agriculture and rural development, the state has been training farmers on good agronomic practices to help curb post-harvest losses.
"The first way the state government is reducing post-harvest losses is through training on good agronomic practices, which includes preservation of agricultural produce, training on processing and value addition, infrastructure development to enhance the value of harvest and timely evacuation of farm produce from the farm gate," she said.
"The food security policies we have in the state are all-encompassing, and post-harvest loss reduction includes it," she added.
In April, Lateef Sanni, the executive director of the Nigerian Stored Produce Research Institute, revealed that Nigeria requires no fewer than 10 cold-chain hubs in each of the 774 local government areas in the country to reduce post-harvest losses to the bare minimum.
"We have less than ten that are just springing up and being supported by donor agencies and development partners from Germany and Switzerland," he said.
Additional reporting by Kemi Adelagun. Infographics by George Kaduna. Multimedia by Lere Mohammed.
Support for this reporting project was provided by the Centre for Journalism, Innovation and Development (CJID).
