Every tomato season, the cycle repeats. Markets are flooded, prices crash, and smallholder farmers scramble to offload their fresh produce before it rots in crates or worse, never leaves the farm. A small portion of these tomatoes reaches urban centres like Nairobi. The rest are wasted. Ironically, while farms overflow with fresh produce, supermarket shelves in the same cities are stocked with imported tomato paste, sauces, and purees. This disconnect highlights a critical issue in African agriculture: it’s not a supply problem, but a system problem.

Our food systems are designed around scarcity: selling limited harvests at high prices in a hurry. So when abundance arrives, the infrastructure collapses. Prices fall, produce spoils, and farmers lose. Preservation, processing, and packaging remain underdeveloped. It’s a fundamental design flaw in how we value agriculture.

Recent investment in digital agriculture has increased significantly, with apps connecting farmers to buyers, tracking prices, and streamlining deliveries. These tools are valuable—but limited. They assume that once production moves faster from farm to market, the problem is solved. But what if the market isn’t ready? What if the buyer doesn’t exist or the tomatoes spoil en route?

The truth is that many farmers don’t just need speed — they need transformation. They need their tomatoes to become something else: paste, pulp, powder — products that hold value well beyond the few days of freshness. They need the power to extend the shelf life of their work and reach new, less time-sensitive markets.

Without this, innovation remains stuck in a loop of efficiency without resilience: digital solutions layered over a broken, time-bound system. There’s a deeply ingrained belief in agriculture: that fresh is best. It sounds logical. Fresh produce is associated with quality, nutrition, and market value. But it’s also fragile. Fresh tomatoes bruise, spoil quickly, and lose value as soon as supply increases.

This over-reliance on fresh produce leaves farmers with few options when the market dips. Preservation—drying, freezing, fermenting, pureeing—is often treated as a last resort, something you do when the system fails. But this mindset is part of the problem. Rather than being a backup, preservation should be central to agricultural planning. It provides farmers with leverage: a way to hold onto value and unlock demand from other markets, at different times.

When fresh is no longer the default, new possibilities emerge. Tomatoes can be used to make paste for schools and hospitals. Local greens, such as managu (African nightshade) and chinsaga (Cleome gynandra/Shona cabbage), can be dried and exported to diaspora communities longing for a taste of home. Bananas can be processed into flour, and avocados into oil. Fruit that doesn’t make supermarket grade can be blended into smoothie mixes for local vendors.

All this already happens in bits and pieces, mostly informally. But it’s not scaled, structured, or supported. These “secondary” products carry strong pricing power. They reduce waste and open stable, long-term markets. And they do more than stop post-harvest loss; they create lasting value. Yet, governments and investors still overlook this space. Food processing is often viewed as a niche, rather than a mainstream industry. That needs to change.

One of the most glaring inefficiencies is that fresh produce often goes to waste at the same time as preserved versions are being imported. Kenya, for example, produces vast quantities of tomatoes but imports tomato paste. Bananas grow in abundance, but baby food is often processed abroad. Cooking oil is made by Kenyan companies, but they rely on imported raw materials.

Meanwhile, indigenous vegetables rarely make it into formal retail or export-ready packaging, despite being grown widely across the country. This isn’t due to a lack of raw materials—it’s about value flow. Raw goods leave the country at a low price; finished goods return at a premium price. Processing is outsourced. Value is captured elsewhere.

Yet, untapped markets exist. Diaspora communities want traditional dried vegetables, flours, and ready-to-cook mixes. These aren’t price-sensitive commodities — they sell on cultural familiarity, nostalgia, and identity. No foreign competitor can offer that. But to reach these markets, the supply chain must shift.

And the mindset, too, must evolve. Value doesn’t only come from the traditional export markets in Europe. It emerges from recognising the richness and potential in domestic and regional demand, from serving local schools, hospitals, and neighbourhoods, and from nurturing the tastes and traditions of communities both at home and abroad. When we look beyond the narrow definitions of value set by distant markets, we see that opportunity is not limited to what can be packed in a shipping container and sent north; it’s present wherever food meets local needs, preserves cultural identity, and allows farmers to control their destinies.

Infrastructure to preserve, prepare, and package is essential. To make preservation a reality, solutions must be practical and local. Farmers don’t need billion-shilling cold storage warehouses or massive factories. They need infrastructure that works at the ward level—small-scale, shared, and tailored to the realities of rural areas. A single cold room can prevent huge losses in a region. Solar dryers can extend the shelf life of produce by months. Basic processing hubs, equipped with water, power, and packaging, can transform smallholder farms into micro-enterprises.

Unfortunately, much of today’s attention is focused on export readiness, with centralised facilities built for exporting flowers, berries, or avocados. These are capital-intensive and far removed from the everyday farmer or trader. What’s missing is investment in infrastructure that’s “good enough” for local use: affordable, accessible, and replicable. Preservation must become a regular part of farming, rather than a luxury or an emergency measure.

The deeper issue is systemic: we’ve built agricultural systems to manage scarcity, not absorb abundance. We’ve trained farmers to harvest fast and sell even faster. But if we shift our thinking toward building value beyond the harvest window, we create room for resilience, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

When processing becomes part of everyday life, farmers gain more than income. They gain power. Power to shape products, enter new markets, and hold value on their terms. This is how you create a stronger food economy. It is not just about producing more but also about making better use of what’s already grown. It is also providing farmers with the means not just to harvest, but to preserve, process, and package.

It’s time we stopped asking how to move the tomato faster and started asking what else it can become.

Co-authored with Ambassador Professor Bitange Ndemo as part of a series on Value Chain Productivity and Innovation