Postharvest Losses and their Determinants: A Challenge to Creating a Sustainable Cooking Banana Value Chain in Uganda

Abstract

Postharvest losses (PHL) result in direct food and income losses to farmers and consumers globally. PHL reduction strategies offer unique opportunities to contribute to sustainable food systems for increased food security and farm incomes for more than 200 million food insecure people in sub-Saharan Africa. Lack of empirical information remains a major challenge to operationalization of PHL reduction strategies in many countries of the region. This paper utilizes cross-sectional data to determine the extent and factors that are influencing postharvest losses in the cooking-banana value chain in Uganda. We find that 14.9% of all the cooking bananas that are produced in Uganda suffer postharvest deterioration along the value chain (7.2% of the bananas deteriorate completely and have no residual value, while 7.7% deteriorate partially and are sold at discounted prices), mostly affecting retailers. At farm level, female headed households experience more losses than those headed by males. Household headship, household size, proportion of land allocated to banana production, and monthly banana production are the principal determinants of PHL at farm level. At retail level, such losses are mainly determined by sex of the vendor and group membership. The findings call for comprehensive and gender-responsive PHL reduction strategies.

Determinants of postharvest losses along smallholder producers maize and Sweetpotato value chains: an ordered Probit analysis

“…The coefficient estimates at other nodes of the maize value chain (Table 6 A&B), average years of education is significant and negative for transport (to homestead), drying, shelling, and selling, suggesting that at these stages, more educated farmers are less likely to report they experience higher losses. This result is in line with the findings from recent literature such as Mebratie et al (2015) and Kikulwe et al (2018) that farmers with more education have lower postharvest loss compared to their counterparts with less education. For the transport, drying and milling stages, the coefficients of the training received on PHL are negative and significant, which indicate that farmers who received training on PHL management are less likely to be related to high losses at transport, drying, and milling stages.…”

The Effect of Active Paper Packaging Enriched with Oleoresin from Solid Waste of Pressed Curcuma xanthorrhiza Roxb. Placement Methods on Quality of Refrigerated Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa)

“…These conditions could increase the post-harvest losses due to deterioration, loss of quality, loss of nutritional value, loss of viability and finally commercial loss (Sawicka, 2019). Therefore, the reduction of postharvest losses may become a central pillar of sustainable global food systems (Kikulwe et al, 2018).…”

Seed Security Factors Driving Farmer Decisions on Uptake of Tissue Culture Banana Seed in Central Uganda

“…First, banana is a major staple for more than half of Uganda's population, and it provides a wide range of products (animal feeds, charcoal briskets, crafts, construction materials, etc.) which significantly contribute to food and income security of the populace and consequently to national development [9]. Despite the value and benefits derived from bananas, diseases such as banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) threaten its survival in the country.…”