MIT researchers inform World Food Program work to reduce post-harvest losses
According to the World Food Program (WFP), nearly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, and over half of that food waste happens during production, post-harvest handling, and storage. Post-harvest storage technologies like silos and hermetic bags have been successfully developed and piloted with smallholder farmers over the past several decades to mitigate food loss caused by improper storage, but none of these technologies have reached significant scale — until now. Within just a couple of harvests, over 110,000 farmers have chosen to participate in WFP’s post-harvest loss reduction programme, with even larger aspirations ahead. MIT researchers have now released a new report evaluating various post-harvest storage technologies sold as a part of a special operation run by the World Food Program in Uganda to better understand which technologies are best poised for scale. The report, “Scaling Adoption of Hermetic Post-Harvest Storage Technologies in Uganda,” details the study design...