Nairametrics| The Minister for Trade Okey Enelamah has revealed that Nigeria will increase custom duties for tomato imports and waive tariffs for some farming equipment to stimulate local production and investment in the agriculture sector.
He made this remark on Wednesday when discussing with reporters.
“We are going to go up. We will be announcing what the new tariffs are but clearly there is a new set of tariffs,”
According to an article in Reuters, Customs duties on some greenhouse equipment currently as high as 20 percent would be removed.
“We are going to restrict imports of finished tomato products that can be produced locally,” the minister said.
Dangote, company owned by Africa’s richest man, announced last month that it shut down its tomato plant blaming lack of forex for not being able to import raw materials required to produce.
“Where the foreign exchange is not available, we are cutting down our operations. For example, we had a tomato-based processing plant, we have shut it down,” Devakumar Edwin, a senior executive with Dangote’s business, told Reuters in an interview.
Nigeria produces around 1.5 million tonnes of tomatoes a year but the bulk of them begins to rot before they get to the market due to poor roads and storage facilities.