Reducing spoilage in food aid shipments
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) ships out food aid worth more than $1 billion every year — over a million tons of grains, soybeans, and other staples sent to dozens of countries around the world. Even though the agency estimates that only about 1 percent of that food is lost to spoilage, that’s still over 10 million dollars’ worth of food annually that never gets to needy people’s plates. And some within-nation food procurement suffers even higher losses. Now, researchers are systematically exploring a variety of alternative packaging materials and containers to see which work best, and most cost-effectively, at reducing such losses. For the past year, a research project run by the MIT Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) has been studying possible solutions to the problem. They have made multimillion-dollar purchases of a milled corn and soybean product, split peas, and sorghum, and had them shipped to two...