The Dangote tomato processing factory located in Kano has been shut down following the failure of farmers engaged to supply the factory with raw materials.
The farmers are said to have abandoned tomato farming at the start of the rainy season in May.
Abdulkareem Kaita, the managing director of Dangote Farms, told Bloomberg that the company is losing at least N30 million every month as a result of the closure.
Kaita told the publication, “We knew tomato is a seasonal crop before we started as it’s the case in China and Europe.”
“What we set out to do was reduce the post-harvest loss yearly to feed the factory.”
According to Kaita, the farm has already acquired a 5,000-hectare of farmland to cultivate a high-yield variety of tomatoes to supply the factory with raw materials and at the same time introduce the variety to other farms to increase their productivity.
He continued, “With this, the output of the farmers would tremendously improve and the processing factory would record ample supply.”
“The effective implementation of the government’s policy in restricting tomato paste importation will guarantee more investment in the tomato value chain, which will eventually lead to self-sufficiency in few years to come.”
The tomato processing factory was launched by Dangote in 2016, to reduce importation of tomato paste, estimated at 400,000 tonnes annually.
The plant has the capacity to process 1,200 tonnes of tomato a day and needs about 40 trucks of fresh tomatoes per day with each truck handling 30 tonnes of produce.
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