Nigeria can tackle N3.5trn post-harvest losses with effective cold chain

…As experts at Propak W/Africa address food insecurity issues

Experts have said that Nigeria can cut down its N3.5 trillion post-harvest losses with the adoption of an effective cold chain.

Nigeria loses an average of 526 million tons of food annually while 30 percent of food production is lost every year due to lack of cold chains, the experts said.

At a seminar during the Propak West Africa 2024 event themed, ‘Unlocking Nigeria’s Food Security: Implementation of Smart Packaging to Reduce Waste,’ experts said the country can cut down its food waste with proper cold chain practices, including quality cooling facilities, cooling vans, among others.

“Cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain. It is an unbroken storage chain that involves a series of regulated production, storage, and distribution activities, along with associated equipment and logistics which maintain a desired low-temperature range across the system,” Augustine Okoruwa, regional programme manager, Helen Keller International, said during a session in Lagos on Tuesday.

Okoruwa said through technology like telematics, food transportation from producing states to different parts of the country can now be monitored, including the appropriate temperature of the food item.

“Telematics is the ultimate goal of the cold chain,” he said. “It is to safely and consistently deliver the desired food product’s nutritional value and quality at every step in the cold chain, from harvest or production site to the consumer.”

According to the experts, 45 percent of all fruits and vegetables, 35 percent of all fish and seafood, and 30 percent of cereals are lost at the post-harvest level due to a lack of proper storage facilities.

Okoruwa, who has over 40 years of experience in the study of post-harvest losses, noted that about 70 percent of all food produced are wasted in households, restaurants, and across other food sources.

Read also: Annual N3.5trn post-harvest loss swallows five-year agric budget

“The hotels, restaurants, caterers, and industries should also be sensitised. If you go to events, there’s a lot of loss. People take quantities of food they cannot finish,” he noted further.

Nigeria is one of the largest producers of food in Africa, but it also has one of the highest rates of food wastage in the world.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Nigeria wastes about one-third of its food production yearly, which is enough to feed over 40 million people.

Recent findings by BusinessDay have shown that the country’s annual post-harvest loss of N3.5 trillion surpasses its combined five-year federal budget for agriculture.

“With access to sustainable cooling and cold chain, farmers can grow perishable nutritious crops with confidence. They will be able to transport them to markets without fear of spoilage,” Okoruwa added.

In Africa’s most populated nation, agriculture is majorly driven by subsistence farmers in rural communities where there is no access to storage facilities.

Adebusola Olude, a packaging research & development specialist at Crown Flour Mill Limited, called for the utilisation of environmentally-friendly food packages to reduce greenhouse emissions.

“If we can adopt edible packaging, I don’t need to recycle my materials again because it consumes more energy through that process. The approach is to monitor and control purchased items through smart food packaging,” she stated.

Also, Muyiwa Gbadegesin, managing director of Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA), noted that with a population of about 23 million people in the state, an average of 13,000 tons of organic and inorganic waste is generated daily.

“We know we have issues of undernourishment. People don’t have food to eat, yet there’s a lot of food waste daily. This is why we’re talking about food security,” he said.

Gbadegesin said the Lagos government’s ban on styrofoam in January 2024 resulted from its impending danger to the health and safety of Lagosians, particularly in the area of flooding.

He therefore urged manufacturers to produce edible packages that would aid in cutting down plastic waste in the country.

“We have five landfills that we’re currently operating and three of them are at the end of life, which we must shut down. That means we must embrace a zero-waste approach to managing our waste,” Gbadegesin added, stressing the need for an efficient waste management approach.

Food wastage has a significant environmental and social impact in Nigeria.

When food is wasted, it ends up in landfills, where it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.