A surge of fresh produce from farms has sent vegetable prices tumbling across Kano, offering relief to shoppers who spent much of the year paying steep prices. A market survey by the News Agency of Nigeria found that a small basket of tomatoes had fallen to ₦4,000 from ₦10,000, a 60 per cent drop over about two weeks in markets such as Yankaba and Gwarzo Road, according to Parrot Nigeria.
Peppers Follow
The slide was not limited to tomatoes. Sweet pepper dropped to ₦4,000 per small basket from ₦9,000, a 55.6 per cent fall, while hot pepper known locally as attarugu tumbled from ₦10,000 to ₦4,000, another 60 per cent decline, the same survey found. Traders said the drop reflected a glut as more produce reached the markets, and warned that prices could keep sliding while the harvest lasted.
The Storage Trap
The relief carries a familiar sting for the farmers behind it. With little cold storage, growers are forced to sell at harvest to avoid losses, which deepens the price crash and drains their income, a pattern traders in Kano described to Parrot Nigeria. The structural gap runs deep: Kano spends more than $400 million a year importing tomato paste its own farms could supply, and a 2025 outbreak of the leaf-mining moth Tuta absoluta put thousands of hectares of the state's tomato farms at risk, according to The Whistler, which noted that weak storage keeps the sector locked in violent price swings between glut and scarcity.
A Wider Cooling
The Kano crash is part of a broader seasonal easing. In Lagos, prices of plantain, yam, potatoes and tomatoes dipped in September as the harvest arrived, with a big bunch of plantain falling to about ₦10,500 from ₦22,000 in July, according to BusinessDay, which reported that national food inflation eased to 19.57 per cent in August from 20.31 per cent in July on National Bureau of Statistics data. Tomato growers expect further relief from October as harvests from Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Gombe and the south-west come on stream, in a country that is Africa's second-largest tomato producer with output of 1.8 to 2.3 million tonnes a year, according to Food Business Middle East and Africa.
Harvest gluts and empty warehouses set the swings that shoppers feel most sharply. FoodPrices Nigeria tracks verified tomato and pepper prices across Lagos markets, where the distance between a bumper harvest and a stable shelf is measured in storage that Nigeria still lacks.