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President of the National Onion Producers, Processors and Marketers Association of Nigeria, Isah Aliyu, speaks to AYOOLA OLASUPO about the scarcity and the continuous surge in the prices of onions across the country
What factors are responsible for the continuous surge in onion prices across Nigeria?
Flooding caused the problem initially in the last quarter of 2024. It caused a lot of havoc in the onion value chain, where it started washing away our onions from Sokoto, Kebbi states, and some parts of Zamfara State, then Kano, Gombe, Jigawa, and Maiduguri. That was not enough. We could have salvaged what was left.Then later in Sokoto State, there was a release of water from Goronyo Dam that also passed across the lowland and destroyed some of our onions in different states.
Some of the onion plants that were washed away were at the nursery stage, vegetative, and even at the stage of harvest. Also, the breakage from Alau Dam in Maiduguri killed a lot of our onions because more often than not, some of our farmers travel from one place to the other from Sokoto, Kebbi to join the Maiduguri people.
So, when farmers saw what happened in Maiduguri, they were afraid and when they checked the water level of the dam, and released it eventually, nobody told them to prepare. The local farmers do not know what is going on. All they see is that water has been released from a dam.
Secondly, the climate change pattern in this far north, Sokoto precisely, is also part of it. Normally, rainfall used to cease in the middle of September, and farmers will start raising nurseries in that September and maybe transplant in October to see what they will get in December or January.
So, last year’s rain extended even beyond October, and it was heavy, and we know that onion crops do not like too much rainfall or water. It used to allow the proliferation of one dangerous fungal disease called purple blotch. Once it attacks your farm, it will destroy everything. So, that was what happened with the extension of rain, which destroyed all our seeds in the nursery.
All these problems of flooding and climate change now resulted in the shortage of onion seeds for the dry season production, and it did not affect us alone in Nigeria or in Africa, it also affects places like Spain, and France that are sources of our onion seeds.
Like from France, we get Technisem seeds. From Spain, Holland, and Thailand, we also got different varieties of vegetable seeds as well. The flooding that affected us in Africa also affected them. They could not produce many seeds for the African market or the world market. So, the little they brought to us was not sufficient.
The ones we had were already killed by water and floods. Farmers now have difficulties in buying seeds. Even when you have money, the seed is not available. About 500 grammes seeds of onions which were sold for N20,000 between 2022 and 2023, were sold for N50,000 in 2024. Towards the last quarter of 2024, we were buying seeds as high as N180,000 and you need about five of them to cultivate a hectare.
It’s not the price of the seed that is costly, it’s because those who have it started selling it as if they were selling silver or diamond. People were looking for seeds to cultivate; so, they were buying them at a very high price. Seeds were not available. It led us to declare a state of emergency in the onions sub-sector at the end of October 2024 or the first week of November.
We were trying to draw the attention of all stakeholders involved; Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, non-governmental organisations, and everybody, to give their urgent attention to this sub-sector so that we can see how we can solve this situation, but nobody rendered a hand of help to us.
I think it was only the efforts of the National Assembly by the Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture Production and Services, who invited us and inquired about the cause of the surge in onion price, and we explained to him. It was in December when people were preparing for Christmas and New Year. Then he quickly wrote to the Minister of Agriculture, and also the Executive Secretary of the National Agricultural Development Fund, for them to give the urgent intervention.
What was their response?
From the information available to me, the National Agricultural Development Fund has replied to the National Assembly’s letter. But we have not heard from the ministry. So, it’s not easy, and because of the lack of intervention on seeds, it led to some unpatriotic citizens or people going to Niger Republic and Algeria to import adulterated onion seeds for us and about 60 to 70 per cent of our farmers started using the seeds.
Onion seeds grow underground; so, whatever is growing up, you wouldn’t know what is growing underground until when you are about to harvest or when you are expecting it to start forming a bulb. It was at that stage, that people now started noticing that what they planted was not the original seeds that would produce onions for them. They are still counting their losses, and the thing has rampaged Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Kaduna, Jigawa states, and Maiduguri.
Have you been able to estimate the amount lost by some of your producers?
Currently, we have lost about 200,000 metric tons worth of onions nationwide and the value is around N150bn within two to three months. In onion production, the reason why you see onion does not get scarce is because we produce it more than three times a year. We do the wet season, the off-wet season, and then the dry season. The dry season is the one that we are doing now and that is the highest. It’s the one that we always harvest in March and April.
When we harvest it, onions will be available almost throughout the country and will be very cheap. They are selling onions in Sokoto for around N150,000, N160,000, and N180,000. By this time in the previous year, it was around N50,000. They even sold it for N30,000, but now they are selling it for N160,000, N170,000, and N180,000. It’s supposed to start coming down, instead, it’s going up and the problem will continue to deteriorate because the onions we are supposed to harvest in February, March, or April, is the ones that we are taking out in the form of leaves.
Maybe I will send you a picture where people are harvesting it in the form of spring leaves because it will not pop up. Investigation even showed us that the seeds were like a shallot. Shallot is like an onion, but it only grows a small bulb that is longitudinal. It’s not the real onion but they are in the same family with onions.
A bulb of onion is now sold between N200 and N500. In what ways have the recent scarcity of onions affected the livelihoods of producers, marketers, and consumers?
There was a time that I visited a community in Wurno, a local government in Sokoto State; you would think that a war just happened, and the people of the community were dead. They are alive but I just saw clusters of people in different places so quiet and silent because onion production is their whole life. It is the only thing that they produce, and they use it to buy rice, millet, maize, and sorghum for food when they sell the onions.
It is the same onions they always sell to raise money for wedding ceremonies for their children. Then in March, he’s expecting that he will sell some of the harvest from his onions to take care of that wedding. That is also the source to pay your children’s school fees and to settle hospital bills for your health, and now, everything is gone.
Are there enough storage facilities for this crop, especially for the post-harvest season?
Part of the reasons behind the surge in onion price and scarcity is the problem of the storage facility. We lose more than half of what we produce because we don’t have an improved storage facility that will keep these onions. What we have now is the traditional system that we do with sorghum straw, millet straw, and thatch grasses. So, when you store that one, after one, two, or three months; like when I stored in April last year, after three months, I lost 35 per cent of what I stored.
For someone that left it after six months, maybe towards October, when onions that we bought in April last year were N22,000 and in October, it rose to N280,000. When you leave it till that period because you want to make a huge profit, if you are lucky, you only get three bags but normally, you will get two bags. So, you see, seven has gone.
For my own that I stored in April, I sold in July, but I lost 35 per cent. That is three and a half. For every 10 bags, you lost three and a half. It may not be like that randomly. So, if you leave it till the Ember months, maybe you will get 30 and lose 70 per cent; that is if you are lucky.
If you’re not, you will lose 80 per cent and get 20 per cent, but because the price has increased, you will make a profit. If you bought maybe 10 bags for N22,000 each for N220,000 and put in other add-ons, then you sell for N280,000; even if it is two bags, you have made a return on investment and multiplied your profits.
Scarcity and forces of demand and supply make the price go up. This issue should rather be a blessing for us and not a problem if our people know what they are supposed to do because it should be used to create more job opportunities, boost the economy, to save efforts, labour, time, and resources of our farmers from going to waste.
What has been the impact of insecurity on onion production and supply chains?
Of course, insecurity has affected production but some of our farmers take this business as their source of livelihood. They don’t have other jobs. Those in the locality where they produce onions have over time got themselves used to the situation. If you look at the bandit character, you will notice when it is time for production, they will leave the people.
It is around mid-December and January that they will now start picking people because those bandits are not doing the farming, and they know that around that time, onion and garlic dealers will be taking their produce to the market and one of the problems is that they don’t receive money into their bank accounts. A lot of people are seeing you’re taking bags of onions, which cost N200,000.
That means 10 bags will give you N2m but when you have 100 bags, then before you know it, informants will tell the bandits you have money. Then they will go and kidnap the person and demand ransom. Now, in those villages, people are getting adapted to the situation, and they continue with their production and normal life.
It is only the people outside the locality that are afraid to go there. They are used to the situation but with the help that also comes from the state and federal governments; they are making efforts like forming local vigilantes, volunteers, and so on. Some are even protecting their communities by themselves with those local vigilantes.
How does inflation affect the input costs of onion production?
The input costs are high. The onion seeds we used to buy even in 2023 before the removal of fuel subsidy per bag was N20,000. After that, it got to N50,000, to N56,000, then this year, it went as high as N180,000. Fertilizer has also gone up from N30,000 to N35,000. The price of herbicides and pesticides we used to buy for N4,000 is now from N15,000 to N18,000, not to mention the price of petrol we use for irrigation.
Would you say the government, policy or intervention has worsened the onion supply crisis?
Sometimes I don’t know where it goes wrong. It is not that the government doesn’t have good programmes. In the dreamt programme, when you study it, you will think they are being instructed by God to carry out that, but the problem is with implementation. When the government appoints someone to implement a programme, the moment the person assumes office, he thinks the programme belongs to them.
Then they start bringing sentiment, nepotism, and all sorts of things. A Federal Government project is supposed to be done with utmost patriotism, professionalism, and so on. When all the key performance indicators showed a negative trend, I started writing to the government.
I wrote and followed up, but nobody listened. I wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, and the National Emergency Management Agency. I can assure you that none of them responded. When we have good interventions, we should be sincere with the implementation. That is where we have the problem. Those interventions are not properly implemented and along the line, a lot of things happen.
How do you think the bottlenecks can be removed in implementing some of these programmes?
The government should be able to identify the genuine farmers in the country. It is not difficult to do. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture should be able to have a genuine farmers’ register in the 36 states of the federation, including Abuja. Let’s have a genuine farmers’ register where each farmer will be mapped with his land and states should be able to map out all their lands and give a coordinate for the land.
Farmers should be allowed to register their farmlands, and the government should have the geographical information of all the lands so that when there is any intervention for onion farmers, they can easily ask us to submit the list of our onion farmers with their coordinates then we verify. It’s just the computer that will do the work.
