The Benin City-based agribusiness company, Ellah Lakes, closed a deal with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and its subsidiary, Adani Staple Crop Processing Zone Food Company Limited, allowing supply of technical support services and participation in its seed multiplication programme.

Ellah Lakes, named after its founder, the deceased FJ Ellah, attained quoted company status in 1993 when it listed in Lagos. In 2016, the company stopped running its primary fish farming business, unable to break the sequence of loss-making reaching back to at least 2012.

It has heaped up further losses ever since, despite a takeover by new investors led by current CEO Chuka Mordi in 2019, even though the firm has branched out into the production and processing of oil palm, maize, cassava and soya as well as their derivatives.

The expansion under proposal is the latest in a string of new investments targeting revenue boost and loss cut.

It will help cultivate high-yielding soybean seed varieties on a 5-hectare expanse “located in IITA Ibadan” in its first phase. The initiative will be followed by production of the same crop on a 500-hectare plantation in Adani, Enugu State where, in September, it bought Adarice Farms and its associated assets from the state government for an undisclosed fee.

IITA is to back the seed multiplication move in the aspect of technical expertise in hopes that the improved seed variety will yield 150 per cent more than Nigeria’s average output per hectare, placing it on the same level as countries like Argentina and Brazil.

Mr Mordi said the deal is a “symbolic and significant milestone” for his company’s line-up plans for developing processing zones across Nigeria.

“Adani remains our flagship site and under the supervision of the IITA, we expect to accelerate progress in Enugu State, during the course of 2023,” he added.

Last February, Ellah Lakes entered a pact with a project development company, Montserrado Investment Limited, with a view to building a 600-tons-of-cane-per-day sugar processing plant to run wholly on renewable energy.

Shares in Ellah Lakes have been stuck at N3.6 per unit since 26 August, having touched its one-year peak of N4 at the end of the third week of June 2022.