Reducing Postharvest Losses
In the OIC Member Countries
11
also asked to say what the main causes of losses are at each stage and to prioritise these for
intervention. Since transformation postharvest results in creation of by-products, and these
differ from chain to chain, respondents were asked to consider losses and possible solutions
along these sub-chains as well. The NRI Team used information from the literature review and
in-house expert knowledge of the commodities to provide specific detailed transformation
stages for each of the commodities being studied.
Group 4: Identification of innovation and best practice in mitigating postharvest losses.
Respondents were asked to provide information about their experience of successful activities,
project and policies to address postharvest losses in their field of expertise.
Group 5: Information about the respondents. The respondents were asked to describe
themselves, their affiliations and their level of experience in the field of postharvest losses.
The number of questions each respondent was asked to answer was limited to the range of
commodity expertise they declared (e.g., not all respondents had to answer all 182 questions).
Note that the survey instrument and approach was conformed to the Natural Resources
Institute Code of Practice on working with People as approved by the University of Greenwich
Research Ethics Committee.
Case studies
Depth and detail were added to the analysis of literature and expert survey by using a country
and commodity case study approach. This consisted of identifying focus commodities for each
commodity group based on our understanding of the likelihood of there being postharvest loss
information available, and then identifying countries and regional groupings were field work
might be possible. The countries, commodity groups and individual crops selected for more
in-depth analysis were then approved by COMCEC. In total we were requested to identify 7
countries for case studies which would provide reasonable coverage of the OIC Member
Countries, three Regional Groups of Member Countries (Arab, Asian and African Groups – see
Annex 2).
In the cereal group, the NRI Team chose to work on cereals because of the high dependence on
this commodity in many OIC Member Countries and selected Egypt where it was known that
maize is a strategically important crop.
For roots & tubers group, cassava was selected because in this group it is by far the most
important with the highest number of small farmers undertaking its production. Nigeria was
selected as the focal country because of the known existence of a larger body of research and
current researchers.
In the fruit & vegetables group, we selected tomatoes because of its universality as an
important crop and consumer item across all OIC Member Countries. The importance of
tomato production in Bangladesh suggested this country as a suitable case study candidate.
The meat and meat products group identified sheep and goats as being animals almost
ubiquitous across Member Countries of OIC and were both small and large-scale farmers are
known to exist. The high important of small stock production in and around the Gulf of Arabia
suggested that Oman would be a good candidate for a case study.
Milk was selected in the milk and dairy group, as cheese (and other dairy products) are not
universal. Recent growth and developments in the East African smallholder dairy sector
suggested that this would be a good location for a case study.