By Francis Akinnodi

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Food processors, under the aegis of Association of Food and Agro-processors (AFAP), have called on the Federal Government to beam its searchlight on the sector, especially the Small and Medium Enterprise (SMEs) to save it from collapse.

National President, Association of Food and Agro-Processors (AFAP), Duro Kuteyi in an interview with The Hope, said governments talk about the big industries but the food processors which are mostly SMEs are being neglected as not much is said about the food processing sector.

“If you look at the SMEs sector, you would see that it is more of food processing, one way or the order; someone making plantain chips, potato chips, zobo, beverages and the rest.

“These are the areas you can see SME and if these areas are neglected, nobody is talking about them, nobody is talking about the raw material availability, how the raw material would get to them, it is not good enough.”

Kuteyi said that at this critical time the food processors need to be taken care of by the government in terms of strategic grain reserve, stressing that most of them that are in the SME sector are using grains, processing grains into food like sorghum, like soya, like millet among others.

“Supposing these people are regularly supplied with grains, they would continue with their business life and a lot of people would be kept in their employment.”

He said that one of the challenges of these food processors is that they do not have enough raw materials to guarantee all year round processing.

“For example if you say grains, grains can be preserved in a way that you can draw it till another harvest is ready.

“Government has a lot of grains in their reserve and these grains they need to turn into nutritious food like combining sorghum and soya, maize and soya and the likes that could take care of the daily balance diet.”

He however said the government was deeply concerned about tomato wastage, that it was the SMEs that came to the rescue.

“We designed a program based on the government’s concern on tomato wastage. The project is about training people on how to process tomatoes and we call it proximate processing which is to process close to the farm, so if you process tomatoes close to the farm definitely the loss would be minimal.

He added that more than 5000 people across Nigeria have been trained so far on tomato processing; stressing that some of them have started processing in all the states the training took place.

He further said that the association trains people and its members on complete food processing in collaboration with Obafemi Awolowo University, that this is another added advantage for being a member of the association.