Reducing Postharvest Losses
In the OIC Member Countries
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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR POSTHARVEST LOSSES 1.
Postharvest losses, as defined by the OIC Member Countries, consist of food damage or
degradation of food during different stages of the food supply chain (both quantitative and
qualitative). A wide range of different definitions exist and are well reviewed in the COMCEC
companion piece to this analysis (OIC, 2015:7). Three key recent attempts at defining food loss
and waste include Gustavsson (2013), the World Resources Institute (Lipinski et al, 2013, WRI
2015) and the FAO (2014a).
A key element of these definitions is their attempt to address the differences between
physical/quantitative losses (e.g., weight loss of grain in store through consumption by rats),
where the food is completely removed from the chain, and qualitative losses (e.g. insect
damage during grain storage that lowers the eventual sales price), where the food is still
available, but its cumulative total value is reduced. In addition, many definitions of
postharvest losses consider the issue of lost opportunity (e.g., when, for a range of reason, food
fails to sell at its optimum possible value). These ‘economic’ or ‘market’ losses are hard to
locate and measure, and so have not been the subject of extensive empirical enquiry.
The location of the loss within the value chain is a further complexity to analysis. For
example, several analyses show that there is asymmetry between food loss and waste between
developing and develop countries (e.g., Hodges et al, 2011). In developing countries losses
tend to be greater at the earlier stages of the chain (e.g., production, storage, and handling) and
lower at the consumer level. This, it is believed, reflect the income level of consumers and the
likelihood that they will consume all food available because its replacement has a high cost
proportionate to income. In more developed economies, where incomes are higher and more
food preservation equipment is available, the incentive to consume is marginally lower, and
this is reflected by high losses between the retailer and final consumption.
Many postharvest loss assessments cumulate the losses along the different stages of the chain
to reach a total loss figure. Thus, losses of, say, 10%, at production, storage, processing,
distribution and consumption stages quickly become 50% overall cumulative loss. The risk of
cumulative losses is that any error is amplified in the final figure.
With all food losses, the ability to generalise from empirical evidence (e.g. actual physical
weighting or data relating real prices to possible values) to the overall production of that
commodity in a given geography is fraught with difficulty. At the level of commodities,
countries and policies, information gathered is normally qualitative (e.g. by asking expert
opinions of percentage loss). Even when it is quantitative, the high cost of surveys usually
means that sample sizes are small, and under-representative. These nominal postharvest loss
assessment methods are then applied to national production statistics to get aggregate loss
figures. If the statistics are suspect, a high degree of inaccuracy can creep in.
The location of the loss within the postharvest chain is also important. Most commodity value
chains have evolved to clear the market (e.g., provide a balance between supply and price) and
to mitigate risk. Risk in itself is a factor of market efficiency, but also inherently related to the
perishability of the commodity. Fish, meat, fruit and vegetables and root and tuber crops, for
example, are self-evidently more risky to produce and trade because of the higher likelihood of
losses due to deterioration and the capital costs associated with mitigating these risks (e.g.,
processing to stability or investing in preservation such as refrigeration). Many commodity