Founded in 1975, the National Horticultural Research Institute (NIHORT), Idi-Ishin, Ibadan, holds the federal mandate for vegetables, fruits, ornamentals and spices. Its breeding releases include the NHAm amaranth series, the NHTo tomato lines (notably the heat-tolerant Roma-types for Northern dry-season cropping), the NHOk okra series, and indigenous *Capsicum* and *Solanum* lines.
The institute's most consequential work has been on tomato leaf curl virus (ToLCV) and bacterial wilt — two diseases that destroy a third of the Northern dry-season tomato crop in most years. NIHORT's resistant lines, in partnership with AVRDC (World Vegetable Center), are the basis of the seed sold to Kano, Kaduna and Plateau commercial growers.
The downstream story is the familiar one: Nigeria imports about 150,000 tonnes of tomato paste a year despite producing roughly 1.8 million tonnes of fresh tomato. The Dangote Tomato processing plant at Kadawa (commissioned 2016) sits below capacity. The seed is Nigerian; the processing economy is not.