Acting Director,-National Food Security Department in the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Honesty Kessy invided private sector and international organization to help raise funds for the survey yesterday at the Tanzania Post Harvest Management Platform (TPMP)- Annual General Meeting held in Morogoro region.
He said there is not study conducted so far to establish realistic data, making difficult to trace the magnitude of the problem. The data used are from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) which estimates that post-harvest losses claim between 30 to 40 per cent of grains each harvesting season.
The director said as result most of data used were those conducted at the global level the situation that sometimes does not reflect reality.
“Our study will initially first prioritize regions with high cereals productivity that automatically be in a high probability of facing post-harvest loss, ”he said.
Dr Kessy said once the draft containing the total cost was over, then each stakeholders will be allocated according to their financial capacity noting that the data collected will be used to feed in the national portal.
He said post-harvest loss was a critical problem that affects multiple value chains and posing a threat to overall food security.
According to him, farmers across the country incur losses when handling, transporting and storing their produce leading to huge loss to individuals and the entire nation.
He said that post-harvest losses is estimated to claim more than 30 to 40 percent of grains each harvesting season as a result of poor handling and storage practices.
Besides that, the effects of these losses can have devastating impacts on food security, nutrition and hunger at the local, regional and global level.
Furthermore, in food-insecure regions, crop losses at the farm level not only reduce available food for family consumption, they directly affect smallholders’ livelihoods.
One week ago, the Agricultural Non-State Actors Forum (ANSAF) Executive Director, Audax Rukonge, said without investing enough in addressing post-harvest loss issues, it would result in increased losses of harvested crops.
He spoke at the stakeholder’s meeting to kick-start implementation of the National Post-Harvest Management Strategy (NPHMS) held in Dar es Salaam.
In the plan, 41 per cent of the fund would be contributed by the government and its development partners, while the remaining 59 per cent would be raised by other stakeholders, including the private sector players and community-based organizations (CBOs).
Other actors are international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), cooperatives, financial institutions, etc.
