A decadent chain of food loss in the hunger capital

What you need to know:

  • Thousands of smallholder farmers with farms under 10 acres supply over 70 per cent of the nearly 250,000 metric tonnes of fruits and vegetables exported from Kenya every year, but more than 50 per cent of their produce often never reaches where it was intended in the first place; the dining table

Food waste may seem like the decadent bad habit of the developed world, but even in Kenya, where millions of people go hungry every day, more food gets produced than is consumed. Developing countries share responsibility with developed nations in wasting 50 per cent of all food that is produced, according to a report recently published by the British Institution of Mechanial Engineers (IMechE).

In developed countries, supermarkets reject quality fruit and vegetables for aesthetic reasons, while salesmen encourage customers to buy too much, only to throw out the excess, from 30 to 50 per cent, according to the report.

In developing countries, inefficient harvesting, inadequate local transportation and poor infrastructure cause food to be damaged or spoiled before it even reaches consumers, highlights IMechE.

Dr Stephen Mbithi, CEO of the Fresh Produce Exporters Association of Kenya, distinguishes the two problems as food waste, which is deliberate, versus food loss, which is not deliberate.

“But the bottom line is that whether food is lost or wasted, it is not consumed, and that reduces the overall available supplies, hence increasing pressure on production” Dr Mbithi underlines. There are no official numbers on food waste in Kenya, but since the country exports fruits and vegetables to developed countries, both waste and loss occur here, making it a pressing issue that needs as many solutions as there are causes.

Waste on the Export Market

Thousands of smallholder farmers with farms under 10 acres supply over 70 per cent of the nearly 25,0000 metric tonnes of fruits and vegetables exported from Kenya every year. The difficulty in getting that produce to market often starts at the farm gate.

“The road infrastructure is a challenge because some of the trucks can’t get to where the farmer is,” explains Peter Mwangi Ngumo, a small farmer in Kirinyaga County who grows beans for export.

Farmers producing for foreign markets are located no more than a three-hour drive from Nairobi, but the rains can make even short journeys completely impossible.

And that is when trucks are available in the first place.

Grading losses

From the farms, produce is brought to a local grading centre. There, peas, beans, avocados, mangoes, baby corn and other crops are sorted based on specifications of size, colour and shape. Only those that make the grade are sent to exporters.

But exporters still reject a minimum of 15 per cent of what they receive from farmers, and sometimes as much as 50 per cent.

“You have to remove the ones bitten by the pests, those with the rust, those deformed... but the problem is, after doing all that, we still have rejects! After we have done all this grading on a relatively reliable system, we expect them to pay 100 per cent, so if they collect a tonne we expect to be paid for a tonne,” exclaims Peter Ngigi, a Kirinyaga farmer, in frustration.

“The final grading is done at the packhouse because it’s us who know what the client needs and what they don’t need,” explains Japhet Mbandi, Technical Manager for Keitt Exporters Ltd. But he recognises that some produce is rejected for purely aesthetic reasons:

“Whatever will not meet our quality specifications, we’ll have to reject, not necessarily because it cannot be consumed, but because of quality issues.” Companies like Keitt Exporters, which export to various countries, can minimise rejection rates by catering to different markets with different expectations.

While customers in the European Union have exacting standards, customers in the Middle East are less particular.

But even with diversified export markets, edible but imperfect produce is still rejected for export. While some produce, such as mangoes and avocados, are sold on the domestic market, others, such as green beans, are not in high demand in Kenya. Too expensive to return to farmers, rejected green beans are used to feed cattle in the Nairobi area.

Open-air dumpsites

For farmers producing for the domestic market, their customers are far less picky. They don’t, however, benefit from the coordination and planning that structure the export market.

Produce grown for foreign markets is based on guided production, where seeds are strictly sown according to market demands. But many farmers growing for the domestic market plant speculatively, without knowing whether there is a demand for the fruits and vegetables.

Over-supply can then be compounded by poor logistics, which Dr Mbithi of FPEAK estimates is the cause of 50 per cent of food loss in Kenya.

“Some farmers are good at growing but may not be good at thinking through the value chain side of things. For example, the scale of my production for tomatoes does not justify a pick-up truck taking them all the way to Nairobi, 300 kilometres away, which means my tomatoes aren’t going to get to the customers that would really pay. I’m too far from the market and I don’t have the volumes to transport them within the economy of scale required,” he explains.

Instead, many of these products are sold in a local market, where the quantities and lack of refrigeration lead to produce rotting before they can be consumed.

“What is a market in Kenya?” asks Mbithi, then answers himself: “It’s an open-air field where people who bring their produce, put them there and hope that people come as quickly as possible and buy them because they’re competing with the biological clock of the rotting process and there’s no way of slowing that down.”

The wrong sprays

Another reason farmers’ crops are rejected is because they inadvertently used a spray that is banned in the export market, notably the EU, which has strict and often changing regulations.

As growers are only paid for the produce that actually gets exported, rejected crops can incur considerable financial losses for farmers who paid the costs of production up-front.

“You feel demoralised, it is actually bitter, because if you spend Sh10 and you get Sh2, it means you lost Sh8,” shares Peter Mwangi Ngumo. This loss often leads to further loss as unpaid farmers can’t get the next crop off the field.

What’s to be done

While both exporters and small farmers note roads have significantly improved in the last five years thanks to government investment, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure that producers can get their products to markets.

Further investments in other forms of infrastructure, including refrigeration facilities and processing plants, are also required.

Processing can help eliminate some forms of waste. For example, up until a few years ago, mangoes would be left to rot. Markets, both domestic and local, simply couldn’t absorb the glut in supply as tonnes became ripe all at once. But the situation was resolved with the recent construction of juice factories in Nairobi and Mombasa.

Better coordination of farmers producing for the domestic market, either by the private sector or government, is also required to ensure that their products reach the right markets.

Reducing waste, increasing profits

Mindful that they cannot sell what is wasted, exporters have taken a number of steps to ensure that the maximum amount of food makes it out. The first step is in the fields, where extensive agronomical knowledge informs the picking process.

“If you pick produce at the wrong time, then it’s waste. To prevent that, there’s a lot of training on when crops are due for picking, how they should be picked, how products should be handled from field to shade, because what they do in the field can shorten the shelf life on the produce,” explains Neville Ratemo, Operations Director for AAA Growers, a major exporter to the UK, Germany, Holland and South Africa.

AAA Growers has also had to learn from experience and mistakes. The major supplier of chilli peppers initially struggled when it was growing the fruit in open fields: “When it was too hot, we got very soft fruit and a lot of waste because of ripening and discolouring. We couldn’t maintain the shelf-life,” Ratemo remembers.

So the company invested in greenhouse technology to provide the delicate fruit with the protection it needs so that it can reach customers intact. For products which grow imperfectly or have been slightly damaged by pests, AAA Growers does basic processing which camouflages the imperfections of otherwise edible vegetables.

“We are taking what would have been waste, washing it, cleaning it, dicing it, cutting... doing whatever you want to do to it to give it an attractive feel so that somebody wants to buy it,” says Ratemo.

Exporters also take steps with unprocessed fruits and vegetables to ensure they stay fresh until they reach far off customers. Avocados shipped to Dubai take 14 to 21 days to reach their destination.

So that they don’t rot on their long journey, Keitt Exporters washes them in fungicide to control fungal infections and sprays them with wax to slow their ripening.

Changing consumer behaviour and preferences

While many solutions to food waste simply require investment or implementation, the solution to one of the biggest problems remains elusive: consumer behaviour. How do you change consumers’ idea of what a fruit or vegetable “should” be when it’s based on a factor as subjective as appearance?

“They insist it must be straight! As a scientist I know the nutritional value is the same, whether it’s bent or straight or what. Maybe in terms of our perception of the quality, we need to redefine what we are actually looking for,” notes Japhet Mbandi.

And in this case, a market tool like price is unlikely to influence consumer behaviour. “If you say let’s raise the price of food to stop people from buying too much so that they feel the pinch, the affluent will never feel the pinch because food is quite cheap. And if you raise the price too high, then you punish the wrong people,” points out Dr Mbithi.

With the growth of the middle class in Kenya, the problem is seeping in here as well. “We even have a proportion of Nairobians who are very good at food waste,” says Mbithi. “They throw away bread because they bought a new loaf today. The old loaf is not bad, but they just want one that’s a bit more fresh.”

Whether in Western countries or Kenya, consumer sensitisation on the impact of food waste seems to be the only solution.