Ata Ikiddeh ia a UK based Lawyer.THE N15 BILLION TOMATO GOLD MINE
Opinion:
Lately on my wall I have had people challenge Gov Udom's Economic Policy and style of Leadership, people like Uwem Okpo who referred to Udom as a type of Trump with mental and attitudinal challenges. While I want to keep an open mind in the ensuing debate, I think such a characterisation is out of place both men do not exhibit the same personality traits.
However within the limited information available to me I am publishing one good thing I know his government is doing, and that is the Tomato revolution.
While it's been very successful and reaping huge benefits for its Investors, its participation is very limited and creating a agricultural bourgeois class within the State.
The big question for me now is, how can the ordinary folks of Akwa Ibom State become investors and beneficiaries of what Engr Ufot Ebong refers to as an agricultural GOLD MINE!
It's easy to see why Tomato farming is highly profitable; rice is almost a N1 trillion industry in Nigeria's and 95% of rice is eaten with Tomato stew. This is one investment you cannot go wrong!
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"Everybody wanted our Tomatoes....We made N6 million. We were all shocked. Common tomatoes giving us N6 million in 70 days" Ufot
"Akwa Ibom consumes N15 billion worth of Tomatoes a year. We are sitting on a gold mine". Ufot
*Our Talk Over Breakfast*
Me: Agriculture is becoming your biggest and most successful venture yet, you said you stumbled upon it by mistake.
Ufot: I was specifically referring to Tomatoes. Agriculture was always in our sights but what we didn't know was what specific crop we should invest in.
We thought about Cocoa, we use to be the 4th largest producer in the 50's. Then Coconut with its highly priced oil. While these crops are good, they mature and fruit after 3 to 4 years.
So we turned our attention to vegetables. We narrowed our search to 22 types of vegetables. We even considered Afang and Ugu, the problem was that these were traditional leaves only prized by a section of the country, us and the Ibos. We began to look at cross cultural vegetables, like Cabbage, Water Melon, Radish, Celery, Ginger, Garlic Onions and Tomatoes. It suddenly dawned on us that all these vegetables were growing in Akwa Ibom State but at subsistence level.
It was at this point we decided to order the seedlings of these vegetables from France in order to start our first pilot farms. For Tomatoes, we ordered for 10 packets which we thought would contain at least 100 seedlings. Do you know we ended up with 10,000 seedlings from France.
That was the mistake I was talking about. We were stuck with 10,000 tomato seeds, we didn't know what to do with them and we couldn't possibly throw them away, we had to plant them. So we contacted Mr Ime Uwa of Enis Stores and asked him to help us with a piece of land for us to plant the seeds. Now this happened during the tomato blight last year.
We couldn't believe the success of the project. Each seed of 10,000 produced one plant yielding at least 60 fruits. We harvested about 600,000 fruits. Everybody wanted our tomatoes , the demand for our tomatoes outstripped supply by 500%. We made N6 million. We were all shocked. Common tomatoes giving us N6 million in 70 days. That was the turning point for me. It was at that point I carried out a market survey and discovered the people of Akwa Ibom State were consuming N1.3 billion Naira worth of tomatoes each month, a staggering N15.8 billion a year. We were sitting on a gold mine!
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