Reducing Postharvest Losses
In the OIC Member Countries
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5.3.2. Effects on the Value Chain
Postharvest food losses can lead to sub-optimal value chains. Most food processing in the OIC
Member Countries is either from raw food materials produced by the domestic market or from
imports. The final products are either consumed locally or increasingly exported. As well as
increasing demand for raw materials due to waste, this puts pressure on the environment due
to the need to dispose of waste, lost income opportunities and can lead to lost calories and
lower nutrition for consumers.
5.3.3. Effects on Food Security
Wasted food due to postharvest processing can result in lost calories and lowered nutrition for
consumers in the OIC Member Countries, which immediately reduces food security for the
community, particularly, householders and small scale producers. Postharvest food losses can
lead to these groups becoming more vulnerable to seasonal fluctuations in food supply since
food is lost and less income opportunities as money is diverted for food use, since these losses
reduce the amount of available processed food that a smallholder farm family can keep for
their own consumption. Also this can have a direct effect on malnutrition in the populations
resulting in lower consumption of nutritionally valuable perishable foods such those that
contain vitamin A which can degrade by up to 70% over a period of 2 months in sweetpotato
chips and flour made from orange fleshed sweetpotato (Bechoff et al., 2010). This may have a
direct effect on chronic and acute malnutrition rates.
5.3.4. Effects on the Environment
Postharvest food losses can place direct demands on the environment though either the
incorrect disposal of waste leading to pollution and odour or in waste disposal costs. Waste
can be turned into gains (Sergeant et al., 2015) and this was been achieved for cassava waste
in West Africa and Asia.
The potential impacts of climate change on postharvest production of food has been explored
by Lamboll and Stathers (2014) for cassava processing. Cassava has a very short shelf life after
harvest, which may become even shorter with changing climate. Processing can mitigate this
and climate change with offer both advantages and disadvantage with respect to drying and
storage pests.
5.3.5. Effects on Food Safety
Food safety may have an impact of postharvest production. In food processing and production,
where any food which is unsafe is part of a batch, lot or consignment of food of the same class
or description, it can be presumed that all the food in that batch, lot or consignment is also
unsafe. In these instances, postharvest food losses can increase leading to increased costs to
the consumer and losses in income for the producer.
5.4. Current Resource Assessment of OIC Member Countries for Reducing
Postharvest Losses
The current status and availability of resources that are presently mobilized to reduce
postharvest losses in the OIC Member Countries varied widely by the region, key crops and by
value chain.