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Agripreneur of the Year -Ghana
Agripreneur of the year - 2022
Postharvest Food Losses: The Missing Link in Poverty Reduction
This paper discusses the significance of reducing postharvest losses as a vehicle for making more food available and thus reduce hunger and poverty. Food losses have become a big challenge and a serious threat to attaining food security. Increasing the availability of food consists of two parts namely increasing production levels and reducing the losses after production. Postharvest losses (PHL) of crops are conservatively estimated to be between 10 to 50% with the perishables incurring the highest losses. For instance, according to evidence generated in the Postharvest Loss Global Scale Solutions, and Relevance to Ghana, Carlotta et al (2018) 14% of maize, 13.5% of rice, 31.4% of yam and up to 45% of mangoes are lost after harvesting. On the average 20 – 25% of the estimated 20 million metric tonnes of foodstuffs produced is lost through postharvest losses. The introduction and implementation of sound policies to drive the reduction of postharvest losses and the adoption of new and innovative technologies to reduce losses is the panacea to reduce food losses and thus help in the attainment of food security. The paper also looks at some Government policies and their possible impact on addressing postharvest losses.
