In this month’s episode of the USAID Kitchen Sink Food Loss and Waste Podcast, Anesu Mawire, Project Development Specialist in the Regional Economic Growth Office and Feed the Future Coordinator for USAID South Africa, speaks with Mandla Nkomo, Chief Growth Officer at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture’s Central Africa Hub. Anesu and Mandla discuss value addition at source and how this practice can reduce food loss and waste. Food is often produced at far distances from where it is consumed, so processing it where it is produced, or “at source,” can help protect the safety and quality of the food as it moves across the supply chain. By improving food safety, value addition at source can prevent food loss and waste. Anesu and Mandla also discuss how women and youth can be engaged in value addition at source and the importance of increasing access to finance.
Are you interested in participating in an episode of USAID’s Kitchen Sink to share how you are tackling FLW by preventing, inspiring, and repurposing? Please reach out to Nika Larian (nlarian@usaid.gov).
There’s no time (or food) to waste!
In this month’s episode of the USAID Kitchen Sink Food Loss and Waste Podcast, Anesu Mawire, Project Development Specialist in the Regional Economic Growth Office and Feed the Future Coordinator for USAID South Africa, speaks with Mandla Nkomo, Chief Growth Officer at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture’s Central Africa Hub. Anesu and Mandla discuss value addition at source and how this practice can reduce food loss and waste. Food is often produced at far distances from where it is consumed, so processing it where it is produced, or “at source,” can help protect the safety and quality of the food as it moves across the supply chain. By improving food safety, value addition at source can prevent food loss and waste. Anesu and Mandla also discuss how women and youth can be engaged in value addition at source and the importance of increasing access to finance.
Are you interested in participating in an episode of USAID’s Kitchen Sink to share how you are tackling FLW by preventing, inspiring, and repurposing? Please reach out to Nika Larian (nlarian@usaid.gov).
There’s no time (or food) to waste!
(music playing)
(Speaker 1: Nika Larian) Welcome to "USAID's Kitchen Sink:A Food Loss and Waste Podcast." I'm your producer, Nika Larian. 30 to 40% of the food that is produced is either lost or wasted, contributing to a global food crisis, with over 800 million going to bed hungry. Listen on as USAID experts speak with researchers and development professionals to explore solutions to this critical issue that demands a kitchen sink approach. When it comes to climate, food security, and food system sustainability, we have no time to waste.(music playing)
(Speaker 2:Anesu Mawire) Thank you for tuning into another episode
of "USAID Kitchen Sink:A Food Loss and Waste Podcast." The USAID Research Community of Practice Working Group on Food Loss and Waste aims to share research and knowledge with USAID staff and implementing partners interested in the implications of and approaches of addressing food loss and waste. My name is Anesu Mawire, and I am a project development specialist with the Regional Economic Growth Office, and the Feed the Future coordinator for USAID Southern Africa. Today, I'm joined with Mandla Nkomo, the Chief Growth Officer at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture central hub, based in Nairobi, Kenya, who will be discussing about how value addition at source can be a way to reduce and ultimately eradicate food loss and waste. Welcome, Mandla. Kindly introduce yourself.
(Speaker 3:Mandla Nkomo) Yeah, thank you so much, Anesu. It's an absolute pleasure to be chatting to you at this time. Like you have already said, my name is Mandla Nkomo, Chief Growth Officer for one of the initiatives of the CGIAR called Excellence in Agronomy. I've spent the last 25 years of my life working with producers or small-scale farmers, and I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you, because I think the point around, you know, food loss is an important point, especially here on the African continent, and generally in the global south, and it's a conversation that we must be having more often, and I'm looking forward to it, thank you.- Thanks, Mandla. Yes, indeed, we need to have these conversations as we try and address the challenge of food crisis that we are facing currently. I will just delve into our first question right now. What is your understanding of value addition at source, and how does this relate to food loss and waste?- Thanks a lot, Anesu. I think it's important for us to, you know, attack this question from this perspective, that, you know, if you look at it from a food system perspective, all food typically originates from some production space, and in the space where I operate, it's mainly food that is produced by farmers, and that could be crops, but it could also be the livestock and, you know, aquatic foods, and this, you know, food is often produced quite often far from where it is consumed, so it has to undergo quite a lot of transformation from where it is just a primary product to where it is a product that a consumer, like you and me, can actually pick up either at a store or at a roadside market, and take home and prepare for consumption. So, you know, value addition at source then becomes one of those critical activities that needs to happen to make sure that the integrity of the food and the food products arrive at the consumer in a wholesome manner that the consumer is able to consume without putting themselves under any risk, and that the quality, both from a, you know, phytosanitary perspective and also from an organoleptic perspective is still in good nick. So value addition at source is therefore those steps or activities that producers need to take to make sure that they are increasing the chances of the food that they produce actually arriving at the end consumer in a state that is still consumable and is wholesome for consumption. Thank you.- Thanks so much, Mandla, for clearly highlighting that, and the links between food loss and waste, as well as value addition at source. You mentioned that you have been in this space for quite some time, so my next question is gonna be are you able to give us some examples that we can highlight here on how food loss and waste has been addressed through value addition at source?- No, absolutely. So one of the things, Anesu, that you might not know about what I've done with my life is that I spent quite a few years operating a fairly large-scale vegetable production business. We were the primary producers, so we produced quite a number of vegetables, vegetable crops, you know, onions, carrots, cabbages, sweet potatoes, et cetera, and our clients were the big supermarkets that you find in places like South Africa, so Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Spar, et cetera, and our job was to make sure that when we deliver our produce to them, all they need to do is to load it on the shelf, on the supermarket shelf, so the level of value addition at source that we had to do, first of all, we had to select very carefully, you know, what we harvest. So most people, you know, will not realize this, but if you are in the fresh produce space, selecting what gets harvested is the first step of value addition, because you are already ensuring that the chances of loss, after you deliver the product, the chances of food loss as a result of, maybe, loss of cold chain, or degradation, and so forth is reduced, so we had to select the produce very well, and once we selected it, we had to put it through, you know, a packhouse facility that graded the product, because not all food products are equal, there are some that are higher grades, there are some that are lower grade, and that work of actually disaggregating the commodity actually helps you, as a producer, because it means that for your high-value product or for your first-grade product, you'll earn more money than a product that maybe is not as great as, you know, your first-grade stuff, so it was important for us to then put it through, you know, this grading process, and I think grading is one of those very critical activities that we need to do when it comes to value addition at source, because, in our business, we were then able, you know, to immediately transform our lower-grade product into processed product on the farm, so product that we couldn't sell to the supermarkets, as, you know, retail packs, we could sell to the food service industry, like the canteens, the industrial kitchens, and so forth, that wanted preprocessed product that was already cut, diced, and sliced, so we were able to take some of our lower-grade, in terms of aesthetics, product, cut it up, chop it up, and make it available to another client, who, interestingly, Anesu, would actually pay us more for what would have been a lower-grade retail product, but because we are able to process it at source, we could find a different market for it. So that's a classical example that I think a lot of producers would immediately identify with. But I do know that when you are, you know, growing crops, like some of the cereals, like corn, or maize, rice, you know, crops like sweet potatoes, and so forth, the kind of processes that you might need to do at farm would be totally different, but at the end of the day, what we are saying is that there is a lot of options around how we handle, manipulate our produce straight off the field to make it ready for different markets through this value addition exercise. If we don't do that, we pay the price in terms of the losses that then we incur.- Thanks so much, Mandla. I love the fact that value addition at source provides the producers with many options, different markets that they could access to. So how do we then integrate managing food loss and waste into economic development and women and youth economic empowerment programs, seeing that most of the programs, they've identified that the primary population within the production sources are women and the youth?- Well, I think your question has two elements to it. One of them is what would be the ideal developmental interventions that need to be set up, you know, along these value chains, but I think your second part of the question is really asking how do we make sure that women and youth benefit from some of these interventions? I think, Anesu, it starts with us, as the professionals in this space, really having a good understanding of the sectors that we are supporting ourselves. My own experience, and in my other life, you would know this, I've run fairly large agricultural development projects with large numbers of staff who are working in the field and engaging with farmers and farmer groups. I will admit that one of the mistakes we make is that it's easier for us to recruit generalists and not specialists, because often, specialists become expensive, but I can tell you now that one of the things we can do as development organizations is to make sure that we are informing the generalist interventions, through our colleagues who are working in these spaces, we are informing that by the input from the specialists, so if we are, as USAID, for example, are supporting maize farmers, I think it is important for us to have a maize expert who understands maize as a commodity, who understands the growing of maize, who also understands the markets that maize goes into. To give you an example, if you take maize, which is a common product in Southern Africa, most people think that the only thing you can do with maize is to mill it and turn it into, in East Africa, we call it ugali, in Southern Africa, it's either nshima, or sadza, or isitshwala, like that's the only thing you can do with maize, but if you really step back, you realize that there is a lot of end products for maize, such as, you can extract oil from maize, you can produce cornflakes from maize, you can produce stock feed from maize, and understanding the market side then makes sure that when we are informing farmers, things like, you know, making sure your maize is dry enough to be at 14% moisture before you market it, all those are important, because there are certain end users that cannot, you know, accept maize which has a moisture content greater than 14%. It's not going to travel well, it's not going to store well, and therefore, if producers or processors are buying maize that does not have its moisture content determined, they are going to offer a low price, because they know they are taking a risk that they might not even use 50% of the maize. So it's important that this intricate knowledge, yeah, by specialists, across the supply chain, is made available so that our colleagues who are working directly with farmers, advising farmers, supporting aggregators, et cetera, are able to impart correct information about this product called maize. But you are absolutely right. If you look at a lot of these supply chains or value chains, it's very clear that, typically, and I'm being general here, they do tend to exclude women and youth participation. And why is that? I think a lot of the reasons why that happens is because there's often an issue of power play around the main end markets that are consuming this maize, and who they typically will engage with, but if we opened up better knowledge, better information about the multiple end points that maize can go to, I think we can then bring in women and youth to participate in those markets. Let the men sell the bulk maize to the big aggregators and nshima processors, but what about popcorn? What about maputi? What about maize for stock feed, which is often actually yellow maize and not the normal white maize? What about maize that gets used for things like cornflakes? Those are alternatives which require a certain level of on-farm value addition and processing that I think will bring women and youth into the game, and actually make these quite inclusive supply chains.- Thanks so much, Mandla. With all these options available, how important is it to minimize costs and increase access to finance that is crucial for food loss and waste innovation?- I think, Anesu, you have actually raised an important question. I think we will be kidding ourselves if we held the view that for us to reduce food loss and waste, we can do it in a cost-neutral manner. It's not going to be cost-neutral, it's going to require investment. I think we have already indicated the level of investment that is required at a knowledge level, making sure that there's proper knowledge, but what I didn't mention is that the serious investment that is required at farm level to make sure that farmers have got these options. So I work now in East Africa, which has, typically, two rainy seasons, it's a bimodal kind of environment, so in places like Uganda, it's virtually impossible for you to have enough low-humidity days to dry your maize after you have harvested it, so what if, yeah, we are encouraging youth, we are encouraging women, to set up drying facilities in their villages, link them to alternative markets for maize. That requires investment, but it requires targeted investment, because if we take, also, a non-nuanced view on investment requirements, we are going to be offering women and youth options that they cannot exercise, so we need blended finance, finance that includes a high risk-taking component in the form of grants, which is ring-fenced maybe, by, you know, other instruments, risk mitigation instruments, like guarantees, and low-interest loans with the right kind of tenure for repayment, which makes it possible, yeah, for people across this value chain to be able to acquire the equipment, the infrastructure, that is required for them to contribute to reducing food loss and turn it into a profitable business. If we just say to them, "Okay, here's a typical bank facility, go and try your luck," well, chances are, the people that we are targeting, the people that we want to crowd into this sector, would never qualify for traditional finance products, so we need to have a nuanced view around how we are packaging finance options for women and youth to participate in this reduction of food loss and waste. And what you find, Anesu, is that even as you move up the chain where the waste has happened, even there, when you are, whether you are turning waste into other alternative products, there is a need for you to have a level of investment, and quite often, the ecosystem that supports these enterprises or folk simply does not have the products that are required in the fit for purpose.- Thank you so much, Mandla. I would really want to thank you for unpacking this in such a succinct manner as we try to address the food loss and waste, and also look at how we can do our wholesome market integration with our producers, and looking at the value chain from farm to market. I would really appreciate you for taking time to discuss this with us. Thank you so much.(energetic music)- Thank you for tuning in to "USAID's Kitchen Sink." This podcast was produced by Nika Larian, and is organized by the USAID Food Loss and Waste Community of Practice co-chairs, Ahmed Kablan and Ann Vaughn. Additional thanks goes to Feed the Future, the US Government's Global Food Security Initiative, and the USAID Center for Nutrition.(music playing)