Reducing Food Losses & Waste: Postharvest Workshop in Tanzania
My name is Lisa Kitinoja (LK) and
I am the workshop leader and the creator of The Postharvest Education
Foundation project here on indiegogo. I
need your help to bring 10 to 20 young people to Arusha, Tanzania in February
2014 for a unique hands-on learning experience.
The Postharvest Education
Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to horticulture, education
and reducing global food losses.
“Postharvest handling” involves
all the steps along the foods system from harvesting to marketing – we teach
about when to harvest, how to keep foods safe to eat, how to clean, pack and
store fresh foods, how to process perishable foods into products with longer
shelf life, and much more. You can learn
more about our foundation, this postharvest training event in Tanzania and our indiegogo
project by visiting our website (www.postharvest.org) and by reading the description below. You can donate funds to purchase a tool kit for one of our e-learners, or sponsor a trip for one trainee. Scroll toward
the bottom of our page to see images of the rewards we can offer to anyone
making a donation.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Food waste is one of the biggest agricultural
and environmental problems that you have never heard about. The amount of food
that is thrown away in the world is simply staggering. I have been working since the 1980s on
improved postharvest handling practices for small scale farmers, and lately with
a variety of think-tanks and international organizations to document the
problem of postharvest losses and food waste and figure out what we can do
about it. In the USA we generate more
than 34 million tons of food waste each year. Studies that I have worked on in
recent years have shown that developing countries lose 30 to 80% of their
perishable foods (fruits, vegetables, root crops) before consumption, and with
these enormous losses, we also waste a lot of the land and water, fertilizer,
labor and money that went into food production. You can watch this short UN FAO video for a
quick explanation of global food losses and waste and what we can do about
reducing the waste of the food we grow. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoCVrkcaH6Q
The Postharvest Education
Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that is training young people
in developing countries to tackle these problems in their own countries, by
working directly with farmers, food traders and marketers, and providing information,
demonstrations and education in their own local languages. So far, in the 3
years we have been in existence, we’ve provided long-term, intensive training
for more than 50 people from 17 different countries. We use a written training manual (available in
11 languages) and fieldwork assignments to make sure our trainees gain
practical, hands-on experience.
Kitinoja, L. and
Kader, A.A. (2003). Small-Scale
Postharvest Practices: A Manual for Horticultural Crops, 4th edition. University
of California, Davis. 196
pp. This manual has been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Punjabi,
Chinese, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, Indonesian and several other languages. (You can
download the small scale postharvest manual in English: http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-1450.pdf)
PEF has been featured in several
news articles and publications as an organization that is providing practical
training and extension programs, and helping e-learners to improve their job
skills and technical expertise:
Food Tank (www.foodtank.org) featured PEF in a June 2013 post on their website:
21 Inspiring Initiatives Working to Reduce Food Waste Around the World
http://foodtank.org/news/2013/06/twenty-one-inspiring-initiatives-working-to-reduce-food-waste-around-the-wo
World Resources Institute (www.wri.org) mentioned PEF postharvest
training programs in their June 2013 publication: Creating a sustainable food future- reducing food loss and waste http://pdf.wri.org/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf
Our innovative “Global
postharvest e-learning” program takes more than a year to complete, and the
reward that we would like to offer the trainees who successfully complete this
year’s PEF 2013 Global program is the chance to attend a hands-on postharvest workshop
in northern Tanzania.
We are training these young
people via low cost internet based programs, with assignments, readings,
fieldwork and written reports that can be submitted by email, with the hope
that the knowledge and skills they gain will go a long way toward solving food loss
and waste problems. Last year’s
e-learning program graduates already have been providing training in their own
countries (see below for some examples from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana and
Bangladesh).
This year’s e-learners are
located in 12 different countries, from Bhutan to Uganda. The workshop we are planning to hold in
Tanzania will give our trainees the opportunity to meet one another in person
for the first time, and to work with me and with Lizanne Wheeler, who is one of
our fantastic PEF volunteer postharvest trainers. Last year’s two workshops,
held in Arusha and in India, cost more than $35,000 for 22 participants. This year, in order to pay some of the high costs
for the training materials and travel expenses, we could really use your help.
Lizanne and LK in Arusha (August
2013)—in the background of this photo is the Zero Energy Cool Chamber (ZECC)
that Lizanne constructed with the participants during a postharvest training
program held recently at the Postharvest Training and Services Center (PTSC) at the
World Vegetable Center.
OUR PLANNED FEB 2014 POSTHARVEST
TRAINING WORKSHOP
We have developed a 5 day program
to be offered February 17-22, 2014. The
first three days will be held at the wonderful Mkuru Training Camp (MTC) about
one hour away from Arusha, Tanzania.
Mkuru is in the Maasai lands in Northern Tanzania, near Mt. Kilimanjaro
and Mt. Meru. The people of the
community enjoy a variety of learning experiences at the MTC, from nutrition
classes and animal raising programs to hosting beading retreats for
tourists. There our PEF trainees will
review their e-learning experiences, get their postharvest tool kits (a set of
simple tools for quality assessment, training and loss assessment, valued at
$400). Then we will set up and provide a one day practical training program for
a group of Maasai women who are learning via an OIKOS sponsored project (an
Italian NGO) to grow, handle, pack and market organic vegetables. The last two days of the workshop will be
spent in and around Arusha, where we will visit the Postharvest Training and
Services Center (PTSC) at AVRDC, the Njiro postharvest shop and training center
(managed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security), the Tanzania Farm
Association store and the local produce markets (wholesale and retail).
Lizanne Wheeler training the
trainers at the PTSC in Arusha (August 2013)
Hala Chahine (PEF Board member)
teaching about food processing and storage in Tanzania
Here are some details on some of
our top past postharvest e-learners.
Eight of our Global e-learners came from African countries (Ghana,
Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia) and attended a workshop
in Tanzania in Feb 2013. Fourteen of our
e-learners from South Asian countries (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh
and Nepal) came to India for a postharvest workshop in August 2013. But many of
our e-learners could not attend, since we didn't have enough funds to bring
them all to these workshops.
Mekbib Seife Hilgebrile
(Ethiopia)
Mekbib works on farmer training
programs in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This past year he was awarded a grant
for his research and extension work on par-boiling rice to reduce losses, and a
fellowship that provided him with the opportunity to visit UC Davis in June
2012