President/ Chief Executive Officer of Erisco Foods, Chief Eric Umeofia has urged the Federal Government to support the backward integration agenda in the tomato processing sector as part of efforts to generate employment and reduce pressure on the Central Bank of Nigeria for scarce foreign exchange.

According to him, while some investors have made in-road into the sector through the establishment of processing plants, several entrepreneurs that have indicated interest in the production of tomato paste should be supported to aid the realisation of government’s diversification agenda.

Umeofia, in a chat with The Guardian, explained that his company, Dangote Farms and other genuine Nigerian entrepreneurs and investors are capable of not only meeting up with the nation’s tomato paste needs but even exporting to other countries and earning foreign exchange for Nigeria as long as there is sustained support.

In the interim, if there is any perceived fear of shortages, only genuine investors should be allowed to bridge the gap through importation as was done in the backward integration policy for the cement industry as over 70 percent of tomatoes before now were being wasted in the Northern part of the country. We believe firmly that President Buhari’s administration will rid the country of all the major clogs that have for long inhibited the wheel of progress and made Nigeria poorer year after year before the advent of his administration.

Mr. President sir, we believe in your Ministers but we make haste to counsel that some top civil and public servants in regulatory agencies overseeing the food sector and the tomato paste sub-sector must be closely watched because of the long history of how unscrupulous but wealthy foreign tomato paste importers have always compromised them and used them to work mainly in the interest of greedy and wicked tomato paste importers”, he explained.

Speaking on potential job losses that may arise from restriction of access to forex for tomato paste imports, Umeofia said: “It is not true that these unscrupulous foreign importers have a labour force of anything close to 100,000 indigenous staff because the few of them that have set up any plant at all have only set up micro plants as they still import and even smuggle over 95 per cent of their finished packaged goods from factories in china where they are able to produce substandard tomato paste in order to make staggering illicit profits and endanger the lives of Nigerians who unwittingly buy and eat their poisonous mix of bulking agents such as starch and banned colouring agents which are carcinogenous.

Most of their so-called work-force, including marketing staffs are from their home countries of India, Lebanon and China. The truth is that since the new forex policy was introduced, genuine manufacturers like Erisco Foods have indeed been able to raise our staffing level from a little over 200 to over 1,500 staff as at today.
“We have deployed our hard-earned resources into establishing tomato paste manufacturing factories wherein Erisco Foods presently has 450, 000 metric tons per annum capacity factory with over 1,500 employees with plans in advanced stages to establish tomato farms in Jigawa, Sokoto and Katsina States.

Mr. President Sir, until the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) introduced the new forex policy under your administration; we had almost shut down our factories due to losses we were incurring because of the activities of foreign economic saboteurs in cohort with officials of some MDAs in the previous administration.

We are the first to produce tomato paste in tins and sachets of different sizes in Nigeria. From Day one, we have never imported or registered any foreign tomato paste or any foreign food items into Nigeria because we believe in the capacity and capability of Nigerians to be able to provide ourselves with nutritious food products unlike all other brands of tomato pastes which are being imported into the country of which most of them are substandard, according to NAFDAC report.

The noxious activities of these negatively powerful importers’ cabal who parade themselves as investors must be stopped at all costs”.