Reduce waste, avert food crisis

By Herath Manthrithilake

These days, everyone is talking about a possible food crisis. The truth is that some are already experiencing it. Political leaders are calling upon the people to grow food everywhere possible. Academics are talking about wrong policies, production losses, forthcoming food shortages, and lack of fertilisers and seeds. Politicians promising fertilisers from India and China. There is a global shortage of food and fertilisers. The African continent is the worst hit. Hence, even if we got some dollars, we may not be able to import our food and fertilisers.

There is plenty of room for disruptive innovations in the food supply chain.

No doubt, we need to grow more. While doing so, we should reduce waste. Let us look at where the waste occurs. Yet, we do not make any effort to change existing wasteful practices. Of course, reducing waste alone would not help overcome scarcities, but that would help to ease them considerably.

1. Waste from the plate:

Most Sri Lankans have on their plates more food than they can eat. We eat more not because we are hungry but because we are greedy.

2. Waste from the kitchen

In some houses, eating freshly prepared food is considered a must. Leftover food is discarded.

If your preference is to eat freshly cooked food, simply, avoid preparing quantities that you cannot consume. This is not the time to do so.

3. Waste from bulk preparations

In high-end restaurants, weddings, parties, almsgivings, etc., people waste a lot of food.

There is some light at the end of this tunnel. A few local NGOs in Colombo collect excess food from star class hotels and restaurants and deliver it to elders’ homes, orphanages, and poor families. This is possible only in the late hours of the night when such establishments are getting ready to close. We were told some hungry recipients wait even till late at night expecting food deliveries. Therefore, the service rendered by these NGOs is praiseworthy. These organisations, dependent on volunteer support for collecting and packaging and delivering food to the hungry are regularly having issues with manpower and transport. Find and help them if possible.

A recently concluded study by IWMI/FAO in Sri Lanka shows that around 25% of prepared food goes to waste in this manner. In both the above-mentioned cases, there are enough people, with whom this food could be shared.

4. Waste between kitchen and farm gate

Estimates show about 35-40% of farm produce is wasted. Just imagine the amount lost, and if saved how that could help overcome food shortages.

A golden opportunity for a ‘disruptive innovation’. We should decentralise wholesale markets (make them smaller, and local – close to production centres), and turn them into collecting, processing, and storage with cooling. No need to collect everything in a single place and redistribute it. Let us try to introduce some basic processing (washing, sorting, grading, packaging), and storing as much as possible. Local processing shall open new employment opportunities for the rural youth instead of handouts. Such centres will have many advantages including solutions for the food shortages. Packaging will reduce losses during transport and allow to meet actual needs in regions and excess to store. Sorting and grading will allow the creation of a range of prices, accessible and affordable to all income layers of society. That will help reduce price fluctuations, and be affordable to consumers. Waste shall come down while the income of producers rises.

This would be a multi-million-dollar, long-term project if the government tries to implement it. The best is to encourage and mobilise local youth (as start-ups) with financial support from private banks and technical advice from the state and private sectors. The Ministries of Agriculture Trade and Small Industries should take the lead and involve the private sector.

5. Waste at the farm

Experience shows that a certain percentage of agricultural produce is left behind on the field after harvesting as it is considered unmarketable. It is common for all farms to have different shapes and sizes of products. In farms where tomatoes, potatoes, and perishable veggies are grown, a portion of small size and odd shape produce are left behind as no one is buying those; or even leads to lower prices for the entire stock. It is important to encourage the production of homemade products (chutneys, sauces, jams, dried or dehydrated produce, etc.) from such agricultural produce.

The waste of fruits is another matter – mangoes, papayas, bananas, pineapples, etc., popular fruits as well exotic foods could be sent to the market with some value addition.

The Agriculture Ministry/Department has a section working on this type of work for many years with negligible impact. Indigenous methods of food preservation are also available.

For instance, slightly wrong adjustments to harvesting machines (Buthaya, and Tsunami) will lose around 150 to 170 kg paddy per Ha. A little advice to operators of such machines could save those losses.

This is an area again where youth can engage with self or local financing on a small scale.

6. Crop diversification

More than 100 edible plants are available in villages, but most of us eat around seven to nine of them and even those are grown elsewhere and bought from the nearby shop. Yet, our list of imported food products from other countries is long, and the cost is high. If one does not have sufficient resources (fertiliser, agrochemicals, fuel, seeds, etc) for paddy cultivation, he/she can cultivate a part of the land with paddy and the rest with small patches of cash crops like cowpea, green gram, chilies, onions, tomatoes, green leaves, etc., which brings in harvest within shorter periods in different times. Such a cropping system, as we have seen in Mahaweli System H, provides a steady cash flow to the hands of the farmer and he/she will be protected from price fluctuations due to a sudden glut of produce. Also, helps get his family a sufficient level of nutrition.

Rearing livestock is another way India and China can produce enough milk for over one billion of their people in each country with less rainfall than ours and even sell part of it to other countries. Yet, we are dependent on New Zealand and Australia for our milk needs.

There is no other perfect opportunity for disruptive innovations than in a crisis. We should turn our agricultural practices upside down instead of tinkering with them. We should not miss this opportunity as we did many times since Independence. Let us diversify our food plate, and grow diverse crops and fruits on our farms, home gardens, and barren lands, which are abandoned.

It is a well-known fact that we live in a country with rich biodiversity and varied agro-ecological zones. We got 47 such zones, whereas India has only 14 of them. We have plenty of rain throughout the year.

Countries with less than one fifth of our rainfall are exporting food to other countries. We have sunshine for nearly 12 hours a day throughout the year, but most food-exporting countries can grow crops only half a year.

About 35% of our population is directly linked to agriculture and 60% of the population is dependent on it. At conferences, we discuss ‘precision’ agriculture, which is a new practice spreading in developed countries, but we never look at our primitive practices to improve those. We cannot afford to “jump from bullock cart to helicopter” as yet, particularly given the current situation.

We produce over 1,200 agricultural graduates per year; we have 10 faculties and several colleges of agriculture spread across the country with nearly 600 professors and over 1000 lecturers; the largest number of PhDs in the state service is concentrated in the Department of Agriculture; a wide network of agricultural research stations; a large number of agrarian development department centres; nine provincial departments with several thousands of agricultural officers for extension; thousands of experienced but now retired from service ag. experts; over 14,000 ‘Krushi Paryesaka’ and Niyamakas’ for each GN division; Large numbers of Farmer Organisations. Many other non-agricultural govt. agencies, NGOs, private firms, and the banking sector are full of agricultural graduates, thousands of unemployed youths (men and women), and an abundance of fertile lands. What more do we need to achieve our food security?

Today, we are in a critical situation; everyone wants a System Change; we got all ingredients and capacities for the task. What is missing is a consorted effort to address our food issues—besides, course, an honest and able leadership.