Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics show that almost 40 per cent of the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa is lost between the farm and consumer, with $4bn of grain lost a year – enough to feed 48 million people.
This scale of this wastage is so huge, the World Bank estimates that if post-harvest losses were reduced by just 1 per cent, the region would make $40 million worth of gains.
Instead, as a result of the post-harvest losses, and with more than 233 million undernourished people in its territory, Africa is left to spend $35bn on food imports, in spending that is forecast to rise to $110 billion by 2025.
But this trend could yet be reverses, if the ideas raised at the 2017 African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Cote d’Ivoire are meaningfully acted upon.
Dr. Lindiwe Sibanda, the Vice President for Country Support, Policy, and Delivery, and one of the panelists in a Post-Harvest Management session held at the forum on September 7th, confirmed that her institution was committed to reducing post-harvest losses of maize.
But, “unless farmers can get better markets, they will have little incentive to work towards reducing post-harvest losses,” said Dr Sibanda.
Other factors that need to be addressed for better post-harvest management included farmer aggregation for knowledge sharing, financing, implementation of new technologies and policy development, she said.
Jumping in on the technology aspect, Bhupinder Singh, the CEO of Tanzania’s AgroZ, introduced to the panelists his company’s hermetic storage bags.
“The bags are made of two layers – an outer polypropylene and an inner liner. The whole concept in hermetic storage is that it does not allow oxygen, water or carbon dioxide to pass through to the grains and pulses, and it also locks out organisms such as weevils,” said Singh.
To prove the success of his company’s storage product, Singh noted that between 2014 and 2017, AgroZ has sold 1.5 million hermetic bags in Kenya alone.
In fact, hermetic storage remains one of the oldest and safest forms of food preservation in the world as it provides an airtight, safe and pesticide-free means of storing dry food commodities.
Indeed, hermetic grain storage systems were first discovered in North Africa and the Middle East, where grain was stored in underground sealed pits, in an ancient but effective technology that companies such as AgroZ have improved on with their hermetic bags.
Yet new technology alone is not enough to tackle fully the problem of post-harvest food losses. The African Development Bank (AfDB) has identified a series of other challenges that they are now tackling through flagship projects.
Among these projects is the establishment of agroprocessing zones, in which farmers are aggregated as direct investors, as AfDB links them to markets. So far, agroprocessing zones have been set up in Congo DR, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Ethiopia.
Warehouse receipt systems, which have proven successful in Ethiopia and Kenya are also being investigated by AfDB as another way of dealing with food loss caused by poor storage.
Much more needs to be done, however, and the panelists at the forum agreed it is imperative for governments and other stakeholders to join forces in tackling the challenge. Infrastructure development and sourcing of markets were presented as among the key necessities in curtailing Africa’s costly problem of post-harvest losses.
with argf
