Cold chain, smart tech offer way out of Nigeria’s post-harvest losses (IV)

At N3.5 trillion, Nigeria’s annual post-harvest losses are over nine times higher than the government’s budget for the agriculture sector for 2024, reflecting the magnitude of the biggest threats to food security in Africa’s most populous nation.

The figure comes to an average of N94.6 billion per state (36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, FCT), higher than each state’s yearly budget for agriculture.

The huge food wastage has been noted as a driver of Nigeria’s food inflation, which climbed to 40.7 per cent in May. Food inflation accounts for the bulk of Nigeria’s inflation basket, meaning deliberate food wastage reduction and effective post-harvest management could help moderate Nigeria’s inflation, currently at a 28-year high.

Nigeria’s Cold Chain Industry

Cold chain is widely regarded as one of the best approaches to combating food wastage in the country due to its ability to keep produce at the low temperature needed to extend food shelf life. However, it is nascent in Nigeria, with awareness, adoption, and accessibility still significantly low.

“The industry has little competition. The few market participants are relatively small-scale and inexperienced,” the International Trade Administration observed in a market intelligence report on Nigeria’s cold chain industry.

“Experts estimate that each year, about 11 million metric tonnes of fresh fruits and vegetables are transported across Nigerian cities. According to industry reports, handling this volume of food products should require a minimum of 25,000 refrigerated trucks. However, there are fewer than 1,000 trucks in Nigeria,” it further noted.

Some immediate constraints investors are likely to face are a shortfall in personnel skilled in handling and supporting refrigeration equipment and a poor electricity supply.

“In Nigeria, a significant portion of FFV (fresh fruits and vegetables) wastage is due to poor handling and a lack of CCI (cold chain infrastructure) for post-harvest transport and storage.

“Food waste could be reduced by using cold rooms at the farmgate and distribution centres and reefer vehicles to connect the different stages of the cold chain,” Efficiency for Access, a global coalition promoting access to affordable clean energy, said in a study titled: Assessment of the Cold Chain Market in Nigeria.

“Since most losses occur due to poor post-harvest management at the first mile (near the farmgate), this is where CCI is in most need of development. First-mile CCI should include reefer transport that can integrate it with the processing and retail levels, thus reducing losses further down the supply chain,” it added.

The coalition recommended situating cold chain infrastructure close to the farmgate to make it more accessible to smallholders, which could boost their incomes.

Victor Ebong, a professor of Agribusiness and Development Economics at the University of Uyo, said Nigeria could address post-harvest losses with improved infrastructure, technology, and farmer education.

“To combat post-harvest loss, there is a need for comprehensive strategies that encompass better infrastructure, technology adoption, and education for farmers on effective post-harvest handling practices,” he said.

“Government initiatives, private sector partnerships, and international collaboration are essential to developing and implementing sustainable solutions. By addressing post-harvest losses, Nigeria can enhance food security, support farmers’ livelihoods, and strengthen its position in the global agricultural landscape,” Mr Ebong said.

However, some private firms are taking the risk despite the challenges in setting up cold chain outlets in the country.

Among the notable companies deploying cold chain technology to reduce food wastage is ColdHubs, which launched in 2015 to provide solar-enabled food storage units and refrigeration trucks to move produce from farms to markets across Nigeria.

The United Nations said installing 54 operational ColdHubs in Nigeria helped avert the spoilage of 42,024 tonnes of food and scale up the household income of 5,240 small-scale farmers, retailers and wholesalers by 50 per cent in 2020.

The company has entered into a partnership with Heifer International, an Arkansas-based global non-profit, to deploy cold rooms of different capacities across Nigeria.

As of 2023, ColdHubs had established 58 outlets in 28 states, signed up 9,777 customers, saved 3.7 million kg of food, boosted customers by 60 per cent, created over 100 jobs for women, trained 3,406 farmers on post-harvest management and saved 3.9 million kg of CO2.

“Last year, using our refrigerated trucks, we recorded zero spoilage. There are so many aspects of these truck problems that we have handled to ensure that we record zero spoilage,” Festus Abuma, the facility manager of ColdHubs in Jos, told PREMIUM TIMES in February, the same month the facility was inaugurated.

“Also, we deal with late delivery. We don’t usually encounter the kinds of problems that occur on the way because new trucks have been brought around for these services to meet demand.”

He said the company was growing awareness through radio advertisements and one-on-one conversations with potential facility users, noting that it is already attracting patronage from farmers. The 100-tonne facility beside the Farin Gada produce market in the Plateau State capital can store 5,000 crates of food at a go.

Atik, a produce farmer who supplies tomatoes to traders in the market, said farmers’ cooperatives are willing to explore cold-chain technology if it can help them avert losses.

At the Mile 12 Market in Lagos, said to be West Africa’s biggest fruit and vegetable market, where ColdHubs also has a presence, cold-chain company Ecotutu has set up a 20-tonne capacity solar-powered storage facility to address food spoilage.

The company, which operates in other states, including Nasarawa, said on its website that it has “built a pipeline of off-takers and aggregator businesses to drive utilisation of the hub further.”

Among other solutions it offers are Ecotutu Freshbox, a product designed for fresh food vendors to preserve and transport perishable goods on motorbikes in an optimal condition, and Ecotutu Cooler Bags, which maintains the temperature of produce and targets personal and small-scale commercial use.

A major disruption Abuja-based Flourish ColdChain Limited is bringing into the space is the provision of solar-enabled fridges to off-grid communities for food storage using funds from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Increasingly, other cold-chain firms, including Kennie-O Cold Chain Logistics and SPerishables, are springing up around the company. And the sector is becoming even more diversified with the innovations that the likes of Vendease and Sabi are introducing to the food supply chain.

Established in 2020, the two are helping restaurants and hotels solve the logistic troubles associated with sourcing produce by providing digital marketplaces that link them and wholesalers directly to farmers.

Vendease uses refrigerated vans to help farmers access markets by connecting them to buyers in major cities, thereby reducing post-harvest losses. It has added services like pay-on-delivery and buy-now-pay-later to its offerings.

While Vendease provides soft loans to the farms that grow the produce, Sabi supports suppliers by facilitating loans to scale their operations.

Private sector interventions in grain storage and agro-processing

In 2022, commodities exchange AFEX launched a 100,000-metric-tonne grain enhancement centre in Kaduna State with a $1.7 million co-investment grant provided by UUSAID’s West Africa Trade & Investment Hub.

In addition, the exchange built 30,000 mt storage capacity warehouses and aggregation centres, all aimed at helping smallholders overcome storage limitations.

The facility provides grain enhancement services aimed at curbing post-harvest losses, including girding, heating, cleaning, drying and packaging. Grains, including soybean paddy rice and corn, can be stored in the facility. AFEX runs more than 150 warehouses in Nigeria’s grain-producing states.

In Kano State, international agricultural development NGOs like Sasakawa Africa Association are deploying demo storage facilities such as vegetable tent dryers and aerated onion storage technology through an ongoing Kano State Agro Pastoral Development Project at strategic locations where vegetables are widely cultivated to help farmers address post-harvest challenges.

Sadiq Hamman, the programme officer for nutrition-sensitive agriculture at Sasakawa, said farmers are trying to understand the technology, and the company has been training them to put the initiative into practice.

Mr Hamman said that, upon introducing the technology, the farmers had realised that the vegetable tent dryer technology could help dry other vegetables, in addition to tomatoes, hygienically.

“We decided to introduce the farmers to the vegetable tent dryer technologies because we observed that cutting and drying their tomatoes on the ground during glut will affect the quality of the tomatoes,” Mr Hamman stated.

The vegetable tent dryer is solar-powered and extracts moisture from vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers, helping prolong their shelf life.

“Aside from the installation of the facility, we take farmers through specialised training on how to sort, grade and store their onions,” said Albert Mathias, Sasakawa’s programme officer for regenerative agriculture.

The aerated technology provides the ventilation needed to prevent onions from spoilage.

During the inaugural edition of the Post-harvest Connect Conference in Abuja in April, Minister of State for Agriculture Aliyu Abdullahi acknowledged the scourge of post-harvest losses in the country.

“There are quite a number of efforts, but these efforts are not enough. They are not meeting the demands of the citizens,” the minister said.

“It is not solving the problems of the citizens; that is why we felt maybe we have been working in silos,” he added.

Lateef Sanni, the executive director of the Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (NSPRI), said at the event that his organisation is urging farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices like regenerative and nutrition-sensitive agriculture to enhance productivity and see farming as a sustainable economic choice.

“Farmers are encouraged to integrate innovative technologies such as cold chains, processing, and storage solutions, including NSPRIDUST, to reduce spoilage, maintain produce quality, and tap into new market opportunities,” he said.

NSPRIDUST, an organic solution for pest control, protects maize stored in silos from being attacked by insects.

Other post-harvest solutions developed by the institute are NSPRI dust plant (used for protecting stored grains including maize, cowpea and sorghum from pests), fruit dryers, hybrid dryers (for drying agricultural produce), ice fish box (for storage of fresh fish), fish smoking kiln (for drying fish and meat) and experimental silos (for bulk storage of grains like maize, sorghum, millet, rice, wheat and cowpea).

Kaduna-based Sosai Renewable Energies Company, which also has footprints in Adamawa and Gombe states, has similarly made considerable progress in deploying solar-enabled dryers capable of dehydrating foods through heat pumps. Some of the climate-smart dryers could dry 29,000 kilograms of food at a go.

Solar dryers offer a more effective alternative to drying foods in the sun, which is often unhygienic. The technology comes in different forms, including parabolic solar dryers, wooden solar dryers, solar tunnel dryers, and greenhouse dryers. It has been proven particularly useful for drying fruits, spices, grains, vegetables, legumes, fish and medicinal plants.

Environmentalist Priscilla Achakpa, the founder of the Women Environmental Programme (WEP) in Nigeria, helped introduce the solar dryer tent as a climate change adaptation technology to the Adogo community in Mbaya District, Buruku Local Government Area, Benue State, in 2017 after attending a meeting of Sustainable Futures in Africa (SFA) in Glasgow. SFA is an interdisciplinary collective of researchers, practitioners and communities working on socio-ecological sustainability in Africa.

Ms Achakpa was inspired by the success of solar dryer technology in Malawi. She replicated it in Adogo to help local farmers fight food wastage in the community, which accounts for the most peppers and tomatoes produced in the state.

According to SFA, the synergy between the environmentalists and smallholders has dramatically turned the tide of post-harvest losses, with the community committing to provide the land to install solar dryer tents and the labour, wood, sand and cement for the project. WEP agreed to provide the necessary funds and materials, such as bricks, tin roofing sheets, plastic sheets and nets.

“To oversee the construction of their tent, the community formed a project Implementation Committee consisting of local masons, carpenters, church leaders, enthusiastic youths and the community head, Zakki, who mobilised people and played a supervisory role,” SFA said.

“The communities have reported that their produce dries faster in the Solar Dryer Tent than it did outdoors and that the nutritional properties of the produce are better retained. The Solar Tent Dryer is cost-effective, easy to build (requiring only semi-skilled labour), and suitable for rural areas of Nigeria where subsistence farming is highly concentrated,” SFA added.

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).