Reducing Postharvest Losses
In the OIC Member Countries
51
physical or quality deterioration. Market losses happen when the fish supply is larger than
demand or when the sale occurs at a local/rural market instead of a high value central/city
market. Both quality and market force losses can sometimes be expressed as reduced
price losses.
 Nutritional losses refer to specific biochemical changes within fish flesh as a result of
spoilage or processing. Some losses occur for example where losses of vitamin and/or
proteins during heat processing. Also nutrients are also lost when the head, bones, and
part of the viscera are removed during preparation.
The combined monetary values of physical, quality and market force losses are presented as
the total financial losses, which are used to quantify and summarize the overall missing
revenue from a value-chain or activity. However, the elimination of financial losses may have
unexpected consequences for the overall socio-economic system. Poor quality fish sold for a
reduced price often means financial losses to the seller while representing a source of cheap
protein for poor people unable to afford the higher prices of better quality products. Therefore,
removing financial losses would eliminate cheap protein for poorer people’s diet representing
a threat to food security (Ward and Jeffries, 2000).
An emerging issue is the as yet little understood or defined occurrence and implications of
postharvest losses in aquaculture. For example pre-harvest losses due to mortality of fish
could be classed as a physical loss. Due to the growth and future dependency on aquaculture,
assessing losses in aquaculture value-chains should be a priority for future research and
intervention.
Expert consultations identify quality as the main postharvest loss (PHL) in small-scale African
fishery supply chains. Fish degradation reduces its potential in terms of value addition and
raises food safety concerns. It has been estimated that quality losses alone may sum up to
more than 70% of total losses for small scale fisheries in lower income countries while
physical losses are assessed around 5% (Akande and Diei-Ouadi, 2010). Physical losses,
especially from capture fisheries, are becoming less important, especially for the future, as the
quantity of fish caught is decreasing while at the same time demographic pressure remains
high, leaving few reasons to eliminate edible but less marketable fish from the value chain.
Whilst shrimp trawl bycatch and discards of fish (unwanted catch) was a major issue from the
1970s to mid-2000s, fisheries management measures, dwindling shrimp catches, a reduction
in trawling, increasing demand for fishmeal has led to greater utilization and less bycatch and
less wastage of fish that was once lost from the value-chain has greatly reduced the incidence
of bycatch. Although data on the true extent of this decrease is lacking. In a major shift in
policy, the EU is now phasing in legislation banning discards of fish so any fish caught must
now be landed and used for direct human or non-direct human or non-human uses (EU
undated). Nutritional losses are likely to occur during the processing of fish, such as drying,
salting and smoking; they arise also when fish spoils that, however, becomes highly
unattractive before reaching the stage of being seriously nutritionally damaged (Ames el al.,
1991). Nutritional losses have been, however, only partially investigated and reported in
literature. People working in the postharvest sector are usually aware of losses. Some take
these as a normal part of business, uninformed of existing techniques to reduce them or too
poor to invest in such measures, while others try to cope with losses using financial and
technical resources (Akande and Diei-Ouadi, 2010).