How a country facing dire food shortages and rising cost-of-living haemorrhages roughly 38 million tonnes of its farm produce yearly (mostly at the post-harvest stage) while still claiming to focus on achieving food security is the stuff that legends are made of. With knee-jerk policies and programmes in place of proven ones aimed at strengthening zero-waste food systems, ENO-ABASI SUNDAY reports that supply chain inefficiencies, including poor packaging and handling, heat and lengthy transit times in non-refrigerated trucks, routinely force fresh produce, especially fruits and vegetables, to putrefy. The worsening situation, which constitutes a direct threat to national food security and economic stability, contributes to infant mortality and worsens Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) as the country leads Africa in food wastage.
Rarely does a morning go by without a fleet of rickety, weather-beaten, open-air trucks snaking through the streets of Lagos State into the Mile 12 International Market, where their content – assorted agricultural produce, including fresh fruits, vegetables and grains – is emptied routinely.
Among other things, these articulated vehicles bear tomatoes compressed by their own weight, habanero peppers suffocating under the sweltering tropical sun, and several tonnes of spinach already yellowing due to natural leaf senescence and rapid chlorophyll breakdown from detachment from root systems.
Since these farm products have made their way through the LAKAJI Corridor (a transport route that spans 10 Nigerian states: Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Kaduna, Kano, and Katsina, which connects the high-density consumer and industrial markets in the South-West with the massive livestock and agricultural production zones in the North), by evening of the arrival day, small heaps of rotten produce begin to dot the fringes of the market.
graveyards of highly sought-after food that will never feed a single mouth. No thanks to this multi-day journey in non-conforming vehicles that turn a reasonable percentage of agricultural produce into puree or putrefied mass.
Three days after taking delivery of over 40 baskets of tomatoes, Al-Makura Ndanusa, a 43-year-old trader perched atop a wooden stool in a corner of the Mile 12 Market, found himself doing a mental calculation of the methane-belching heaps that some of his wares had become due to poor packaging/handling, heat and lengthy transit times on pothole-infested roads, which turned fresh produce into waste.
“The market value of each of these baskets of tomatoes that you are seeing here is N120, 000,” he told The Guardian a couple of weeks ago. “After sifting the bad ones, it ran into about four baskets. Now, if we are to do the mathematics, that is N480,000, but since they have been partially and seriously damaged, you can never sell the four baskets for half the actual price. The best you can get is either a quarter of the price, or slightly above that. What that means is that I would labour to sell both the good and the bad ones while praying to cover the cost of purchase,” Ndanusa lamented as he watched his wares liquefy.
Across Lagos State alone, thousands of families are either skipping dinner or settling for less nutritious alternatives because the prices of a basket of tomatoes, a basket of pepper, and bags of onions have tripled and spiralled out of the poor’s reach.
While Ndanusa struggles to come to terms with his losses in the Mile 12 Market, at Ojuwoye Market, which is centrally located off the busy Agege Motor Road, in the Mushin area of Lagos State, Madam Olabisi Ogunyinka has carefully arranged her fungus-infested tomatoes, which she calls “ata esha,” in small bowls waiting for the arrival of their buyers.
Ogunyinka, who has been in the trade for over three decades, said that the never-before-seen rising cost-of-living crisis has contributed to heavy losses experienced by perishable-item sellers “because even the rotten tomatoes are still ‘expensive’ to many buyers, some of whom shop for alternatives rather than patronise us.”
Similar scenarios play out at Ile-Epo Market, Abule Egba, and the Jakande Fruit Market located in Ketu, Lagos.
Up in the North Central, Benue State specifically, a tree crop farmer, Iornem Tenshack, told The Guardian that he has made peace with himself as he yearly watched heaps of ripe mangoes – his major source of livelihood – rot away in the sun-heated farmland before being carted away to markets many kilometres away, or being mangled in transit owing to the crater-filled stretches of rural roads that have remained unimproved for several years.
In the last two decades, the heartbeat of Nigeria’s food crisis has not been a lack of soil or sweat, but the unabating disappearance of 38 million tonnes of food grown that never made it to the dining table.
Daily, the looming impact of Post-Harvest Loss (PHL) and Food Wastage (FW) combine not only to threaten the country’s drive for food security, but also to empty billions of naira worth of farm input and resources into the drain.
While PHL occur at the beginning and middle of the food supply chain, that is, between the harvest and the moment the food reaches the retail market (that is on the farm, during transport, in storage, or during processing/packaging), FW, which refers to food that is fit for human consumption but is discarded, occurs at the end of the food supply chain. That is in retail markets/supermarkets, food service (restaurants), and at the household level.
While both PHL and FW refer to food that is produced but never eaten, the distinguishing factor in the Food Loss and Waste (FLW) umbrella situates where and why the loss occurs along the supply chain.
