HIKE IN TOMATO'S PRICE A CLEAR OPPURTUNITY

The Nigeria I live in is a very blessed country no doubt about that. The only thing that amazes me is why simple things are not working here. Sometimes I find it hard to blame Nigerians who own foreign investments outside the country because it is very hard to invest ten thousand Naira in Nigeria over ten years and still have the value of your money to be ten thousand Naira, it would have probably dropped far less than that. That is not only discouraging but disheartening and frustrating to say the least. However, I am one of those few individuals that believe that we can still be born here, grow here, live here and make it here.  

Today, I want to analyze a simple unfortunate situation in Nigeria and isolate the business opportunities from it. That would be the hike in the price of tomatoes in Nigeria, its funny right! Sadly it has far more implications than just that. In my opinion I feel this is as a result of the fact that we don’t really have any serious storage facility in the country. So when we produce food we actually consume a large part of it while the rest is wasted. We just happen to be so blessed that rain comes every year so we keep producing every year. The truth is, if there is a serious drought in this country we would all be in serious food crisis. In other words the hike is resulting from the scanty rainfall. Now, the thing is I doubt if we even have an elaborate irrigation system in these tomato production areas. The main supply of the commodity comes from the North. Looking at all the problems from the Northern part of the country this year (North-East insurgency issue) and its effects, the farmer versus the herdsmen crisis it is not far-fetched for one to understand why such commodity would be scarce in the south.

Thinking like an American for once, you know one American once said, “think of what you can do for America and not always what America can do for you…” if we were thinking of what we could do to solve this problem especially the issue of food shortage in Nigeria as an entrepreneur anyway. One could isolate the various business opportunities from these.

First, is establishment of a cluster farm in large quantity, in the cluster farming sense, you don’t really need to own the farms, you only need to control the owners of the farm. That way, ethnic clash, social violence resulting from the farm land, land fraud and others is not really your problem. You just invite farmers within the region you wish to use, involve the lawyers, and then you have a contract with them to lease their farm for production. You provide them with the inputs and they farm. Then you buy from them for your onward processing, storage, export or whatever you want to do with it. If they mess up, remember they bought the inputs from you, so you are making money.

Another, is to build a large storage unit for farm products, you buy these products at very cheap prices during the harvest period then you sell when they are scarce.

You might be wondering how you end up helping Nigeria from all these, yes you would eventually when we have so many individuals doing various forms of food production. As against other forms of business that failed as a result of business-crowding, (I mean cyber café, recharge card business, and the rest) there is always market for food. Moreover business is all about risks try it and learn, especially now that you are young.

Please do not forget to leave your comments below if you have any. Thank you for reading through.