[PDF] Evaluation Of The Food Loss Reduction Through Improved Postharvest Handling And Value Addition Of Key Fruits And Vegetables Project In Ethiopia eBook
Evaluation Of The Food Loss Reduction Through Improved Postharvest Handling And Value Addition Of Key Fruits And Vegetables Project In Ethiopia Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Evaluation Of The Food Loss Reduction Through Improved Postharvest Handling And Value Addition Of Key Fruits And Vegetables Project In Ethiopia book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
The “Food-loss reduction through improved postharvest handling and value addition of key fruits and vegetables” project was implemented by FAO Ethiopia over the period 2016–2019. By tackling post-harvest losses, the project addressed one of the major challenges faced by producers. Farmers have adopted project post-harvest management practices, techniques and technologies that have helped to reduce losses and increase food security by boosting income and making more produce available for household consumption. The results will be sustainable because of the economic gains the farmers are seeing and the adaptability of practices and technologies. Studies conducted as part of the project provided evidence of the size and significance of post-harvest losses, which were previously undocumented. Evidence produced contributed to increase institutional attention on post-harvest management.
This report is a synthesis of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Office of Evaluation (OED) on evaluations completed from 2019 to 2021 on FAO’s work in the Africa region. It documents FAO’s contribution to results, identifies gaps and emerging issues and lessons learned. The synthesis is organized around the themes of sustainable production and value chain development, food security and nutrition, climate change and natural resources, resilience to threats and crises, and gender equality and empowerment of women. The synthesis used the Programme Priority Areas of the Strategic Framework 2022–2031 to analyse FAO’s contribution to results, finding many positive examples in the Africa region. However, the sustainability of results is a challenge for the region, due to several factors, including capacity constraints of government partners and limitations of FAO project designs. Gaps and emerging issues include the need for guidance on ‘accelerators’ of results, addressing youth as a key priority and new approaches to partnerships with civil society and the private sector. Lessons learned include the importance of good project design, suitably capacitated decentralized offices, effective knowledge management and strategic and inclusive partnerships to achieve results.
Ethiopia is a low-income country and agriculture is the mainstay of the economy, accounting for for 34 percent of GDP and 70 percent of total employment share. Ethiopia remains one of the world’s poorest countries, despite the significant progress achieved in reducing poverty and hunger. The Government of Ethiopia through its Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP II) has consistently prioritized the transformation of agriculture from low-input, subsistence-oriented production systems to a fast-growing, intensive and commercially oriented sector to support the country’s aspirations to become a middle-income country by 2025. FAO’s Country Programme Framework (2016-2020), was formulated based on the GTP II. Over the evaluation period (2014-2019), FAO exceeded the resource mobilization targets. Overall, FAO’s programme displays several imbalances and disconnects, specifically between development activities and emergency response. The evaluation calls for FAO to adopt a more cohesive programmatic approach and continue to consolidate its fragmented programme. In the context of the Government’s plans for agricultural transformation, the evaluation also recommends that FAO support an economically sound value chain and market-based approach to agricultural development, while upholding normative values of inclusiveness and ecological sustainability.
This study aims to inform the implementation in Ethiopia of the AgrInvest-Food Systems Project, a collaboration between the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) to promote private investment in African food systems that contributes to sustainable development objectives. The study analyses the Ethiopian food system, identifying and explaining notable trends, important socio-economic, food security and nutrition and environmental outcomes generated by the food system, as well as the structural factors, institutions, and actors that shape food system outcomes in Ethiopia.
We study post-harvest losses (PHL) in important and rapidly growing rural-urban value chains in Ethiopia. We analyze self-reported PHL from different value chain agents – farmers, wholesale traders, processors, and retailers – based on unique large-scale data sets for two major commercial commodities, the storable staple teff and the perishable liquid milk. PHL in the most prevalent value chain pathways for teff and milk amount to between 2.2 and 3.3 percent and 2.1 and 4.3 percent of total produced quantities, respectively. We complement these findings with primary data from urban food retailers for more than 4,000 commodities. Estimates of PHL from this research overall are found to be significantly lower than is commonly assumed. We further find that the emerging modern retail sector in Ethiopia is characterized by half the level of PHL than are observed in the traditional retail sector. This is likely due to more stringent quality requirements at procurement, sales of more packaged – and therefore better protected – commodities, and better refrigeration, storage, and sales facilities. The further expected expansion of modern retail in these settings should likely lead to a lowering of PHL in food value chains, at least at the retail level.
The importance of reducing food loss and food waste has captured the public imagination since it became one of the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The urgency of this issue and the awareness of its significance to the development community has been growing steadily. Even so, policies to address food insecurity or the increasing pressure on the world’s available land that is being caused by growing populations and changing diets have aimed mainly at increasing agricultural yields and productivity. These efforts are often cost- and time-intensive and do not consider food loss and waste reduction as a tool to help meet growing food demand; nor do they consider food loss reduction as a means to ease pressure on land. Food loss also entails unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and excessive use of scarce resources including land (FAO 2019); thus, policies to reduce food loss will also benefit the environment. Finally, cutting food loss can help disadvantaged segments of the population, as the loss of marketable food can reduce producers’ incomes and increase consumers’ expenses. Most of the literature uses the terms postharvest losses (PHL), food loss (FL), food waste (FW), and food loss and waste (FLW) interchangeably, but they rarely refer consistently to the same concept. Recent publications (FAO 2014, 2019; HLPE 2014; Lipinski et al. 2013) have tried to clarify this by defining FL as unintentional reductions in food quantity or quality before consumption, that is, from the producer to the wholesale market, inclusive. These losses usually occur in the earlier stages of the food value chain—between production and distribution. This definition, however, does not include crops that are lost before harvesting or are left in the field; nor does it include crops that are lost due to poor harvesting techniques or sharp price drops; nor crops that are not produced because of a lack of adequate agricultural inputs, such as fertilizer, or because of a shortage of available labor. In 2019, the FAO developed the Food Loss Index (FLI), following the definition of food loss mentioned above. According to the FLI, an estimated 14 percent of food produced is lost every year. The major losses are in Central Asia and Southern Asia (20.7 percent), as compared to sub-Saharan Africa, which experiences a 14 percent food loss (FAO 2019), and Latin American and the Caribbean where 11.6 percent is lost. When examining losses in terms of food groups, the highest level of loss is reported in roots, tubers, and oil-bearing crops, followed by fruits and vegetables. It is not surprising that fruits and vegetables incur high levels of loss (more than 20 percent) given their highly perishable nature.
It is estimated that around 1.3 billion tons per year of food produced for human consumption, which is about one-third of all food produced, is either lost or wasted globally. Reduction of the postharvest losses is being considered as one of the sustainable ways to ensure world food security. Postharvest Extension and Capacity Building for the Developing World provides information on postharvest extension/outreach programs, capacity building, and practical methodologies for postharvest extension professionals and food science teachers, food processing trainers, and outreach specialists who work in the field. The book provides information on training of postharvest trainers, food loss assessment methods, capacity building in universities and agro-industry, distance education methods, models for cost effective postharvest/food processing extension work, success stories, and lessons learned from past projects and programs. The book is divided into four sections. Section I explains postharvest loss assessments methods, Section II is on capacity building, and Sections III and IV focus on training and postharvest extension models. Food loss assessment methodologies are highlighted from several high-profile institutions and it is envisioned that researchers and postharvest extension personnel will benefit from the development and field testing of a hybrid methodology, incorporating the strengths and utilizing the best practices from each of the methodologies in current use. Chapters cover postharvest extension work and capacity building in a wide range of regions.
Based on a unique large-scale data set on teff production and marketing, Ethiopia’s most important cash crop, we study post-harvest losses in rural-urban value chains, specifically between producers and urban retailers in the capital, Addis Ababa. We analyze the structure of the value chain and rely on self-reported losses by different value chain agents (farmers, wholesale traders, and retailers). We estimate that post-harvest losses in the most prevalent pathway in the rural-urban value chain, amount to between 2.2 and 3.3 percent of total harvested quantities. The variation in this figure depends on the storage facilities used and on assumed losses during transport at the farm. These losses are significantly lower than is commonly assumed for staple foods, possibly because of the rather good storage characteristics of teff due to its low moisture content. These findings, nonetheless, point to the need to gather further solid evidence on post-harvest losses in staple foods in these settings to ensure appropriate policies and investments