The state earns nothing from export, hosts a flagship processing factory that has spent more time dormant than running, and watches hundreds of millions of dollars flow out of Nigeria to pay for tomato paste that its own farms could have supplied.
The economics of this paradox now sit at the heart of a growing debate about what Kano is leaving on the table and what it would mean for the state’s revenue if it ever got it right.
Nigeria is the second-largest producer of tomatoes in Africa and 14th in the world, with an average annual yield of 2.3 million metric tonnes accounting for roughly 65 per cent of all tomatoes grown in West Africa. Kano, alongside Kaduna and Katsina, anchors that production.
Yet in 2025, Nigeria spent over $350m importing tomato paste from China and the United States, despite holding a crop that, properly processed and packaged, could supply a significant share of that demand and more.
The Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) put the figure even higher in April 2026, disclosing at a technical workshop on tomato value chain development in Kano that the country spends over $400m annually on tomato paste importation.
Speaking on tomato value chain development in Kano under the One State One Product initiative, the NEPC’s North-West Regional Coordinator, Amina Abdulmalik, told THE WHISTLER that Nigeria’s production strength is not the real problem; value addition is.
She said the global processed tomato market is valued at over $12bn annually, yet Nigeria participates minimally, and Kano sitting at the centre of northern tomato cultivation is missing its share entirely.
She added that the Nigeria’s production strength is not the real problem but value addition is. With the right quality and consistency, Kano can supply both domestic industries and export markets.
A Senior Research Officer at the Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (NSPRI) Kano Zonal Office, Adamu Ahmad Abubakar, pointed to the same structural gap: poor road networks, lack of cold-chain storage, weak processing systems and limited access to funding remain the principal reasons tomatoes continue to go to waste. “Ideally, processing plants should be located close to farms, and farmers should be supported with incentives to reduce losses,” he said.
For small-scale processors like Adaora Akojuru, founder of Bera Tomatoes in Kano, the shortage is acutely personal.
She has noted that Nigeria loses almost 700,000 metric tons of tomatoes every year primarily because adequate storage facilities and reliable markets are absent, especially during harvest periods.
A system that cannot store surplus production in good times will always be defenceless when the pest arrives, the rains fail, or transport costs spike.
The most immediate reason Kano cannot export what it grows is that it cannot hold what it harvests long enough to do anything with it. Fifty per cent of fresh tomatoes produced in Nigeria each year are lost to post-harvest challenges, including poor supply chain management, inefficient storage, and poor transportation systems.
In Kano, farmers have described how tomato glut occurs annually, a recurring tradition where bumper harvests collapse prices and produce rots in the open, which they say can be addressed through better storage facilities across tomato markets.
Kano has no functional large-scale cold storage network to speak of. Farmers in the state have appealed to the government to establish modern storage facilities to address rising costs and reduce post-harvest losses, noting that while Plateau state has some cold storage infrastructure that preserves perishables for short periods, no equivalent exists in Kano. Without refrigerated storage, the window between harvest and spoilage is too narrow for any serious export logistics to operate.
Beyond storage, the crop faces a biological threat that no storage facility can cure. Tuta absoluta, a leaf-mining moth that attacks both the fruits and foliage of tomato plants, has repeatedly devastated farms across Kano, Jigawa, Katsina, Kaduna and Plateau states.
THE WHISTLER observed that a 2025 outbreak in Kano saw 4,621 hectares of tomato farms put at risk, with the All Farmers Association of Nigeria warning that inaction could result in losses of between N10bn and N20bn.
Farmers in Kadawa village and other key growing areas have described losing entire two-hectare plots worth millions of naira in production costs and projected earnings to single infestations, with over 700 growers affected in one outbreak alone.
These twin failures pests and post-harvest losses mean that even in bumper years, the supply of tomatoes reaching any potential processor is unpredictable, seasonal, and insufficient for the kind of continuous output that export contracts demand.
The Kaduna State chairman of the Tomato Growers Association, Rabiu Zuntu, said the intervention from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security came too late, as most farmers had already lost their crops by the time chemicals arrived. In Kano, farmers report the same pattern of delayed response. Pesticides that could have protected standing crops arrive when the moths have already completed their cycle.
The national president of the Tomato Out-growers Association of Nigeria (TOGAN), Alhaji Abdullahi Ringim, estimated that farmers lost more than N1.7bn in 2023 to the pest. In Kano State specifically, the TOGAN chairman estimated that Tuta Absoluta attacked and damaged more than N1.5bn worth of tomato plants in that same year
The consequences of building processing capacity on top of these unresolved supply problems are best illustrated by the story of Nigeria’s largest tomato processing factory, located in Kadawa on the outskirts of Kano.
Aliko Dangote launched the $20m facility in March 2016 with the stated goal of supplanting Nigeria’s reliance on imported tomato paste. The factory was designed to process 1,200 tonnes of tomatoes a day and required approximately 40 truckloads of fresh tomatoes daily each carrying 30 tonnes to run at capacity.
It never consistently ran at capacity. The factory shut down in late 2017, barely a year and a half after launch, due to lack of raw materials and a price dispute between the company and farmers.
It remained idle for over two years before resuming in March 2019, and then shut down again by September of that year when farmers abandoned tomato cultivation at the onset of the rainy season for crops with more reliable returns.
The managing director of Dangote Farms, Abdulkareem Kaita, said the company was losing at least N30m every month it remained closed. By 2025, the factory’s situation had deteriorated further. Kaita, speaking as former managing director, said the plant had been shut for four years, citing the impossibility of competing with Chinese imports that contain starch, flour, and as little as 10 percent tomato content, sold at prices far below what locally sourced, 100 per cent tomato production can match.
He said the high cost of energy and fresh tomatoes made operations commercially unviable. The Kadawa factory, once described as a beacon for Nigeria’s agricultural transformation, now stands dormant and unable to compete with cheap substandard imports and crippling operational costs. The Dangote experience has had a chilling effect on private investment in Kano’s tomato processing sector.
No comparable investor has moved to fill the gap. Only about 20 per cent of Nigeria’s vegetable production is processed at all, largely because of inadequate processing infrastructure nationwide. In Kano specifically, what little processing exists is artisanal and serves only the domestic market.
The contrast with Kaduna is instructive. In February 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the Kaduna State Government signed a formal partnership agreement to address critical challenges in the tomato value chain, targeting improved production techniques, storage and processing infrastructure, reduced post-harvest losses, and stronger farmer cooperatives.
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