Posted on September, 22, 2020 at 07:24 am
THE Permanent Secretary (PS) in the ministry of agriculture, Mr Gerald Kusaya has said stakeholders in the agriculture value chain should concentrate on addressing post-harvest losses and reduce it by 50 percent by 2025.
The PS was speaking here yesterday, while gracing the second national post-harvest management that brought together farmers and multi stakeholders from Tanzania and beyond practicing post-harvest management.
However, he advised farmers and other stakeholders to control food loss and food waste to address the challenges of shortage of food in some regions in the country.
He said the government was implementing a ten year (2019-2029) National Post harvest product management strategy to address the challenges of post-harvest losses, which undermines the family and national economy, food security and export trade.
"Some regions will suffer from food insecurity due to poor systems of storage of food, leads to a decrease in yields and increased in price. This is due to post harvest losses which estimated at between 30 and 40 percent per cereal crops with the highest percentage in perishable crops,” he said.
He said that, the forecast of food production for 2019/2020 shows that production is expected to reach 17,742,388 tons where demand is 14, 347,955 tons.
Due to that the country is expected to have a surplus of 3, 511,620 tons of food of which 1, 322,020 tons are of grains and 2, 072,413 tons are of non-grain crops.
Source: Daily News