Ethiopia Striving To Minimize Post-harvest Crop Losses

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Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture is striving to minimise post-harvest losses which is causing up to 30 per cent production loss even as the country’s grain output continues to increaser.

Post-harvest losses are occurring during the food production chain, including harvesting, handling, storage, processing, packing and transportation of the grains, say the Director-General for Agriculture Extension Services of the Ministry, Tesfaye Mengste.

He added here Wednesday that the country lost between 20 per cent and 30 per cent of the total production during the food production chain, mainly during the harvesting, storage and transportation stages.

The Ministry has started to train farmers and extension workers on ways of minimizing post-harvest losses during harvesting as most of the post-harvest loss occurred during this phase as a result of the use of outdated means to gather crops.

Transportation is another cause for post-harvest production loss, he said, adding that the Ministry was also working on improving transportation means for farmers, since most of the farmers still used pack animals to transport agricultural products to markets.

The Ministry is providing carriages for farmers in selected areas to transport agricultural products so as to minimize losses during this process, Tesfaye said.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one-third of the food produced in the world goes to waste, or 1.3 billion tons every year.

Source : Bernama