ColdHubs installation at Relife Outdoor Food Market, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria. The World Bank estimates that 40 percent of all food produced goes to waste in Nigeria. Credit: ColdHubs.

By Busani Bafana
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, Dec 14 2021 (IPS)

Food spoilage forced smallholder farmers out of pocket and out of business – until an entrepreneur came up with a cool idea.

Growing up on a farm in Southern Nigeria, Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu observed how smallholder farmers rushed to sell their produce before sunset to avoid spoiling or selling it at give-away prices. Ikegwuonu came up with a cool idea to save the produce from spoiling: solar-powered cold rooms.

Smallholder farmers in Africa experience high post-harvest food losses owing to poor handling, poor packaging and lack of storage for their produce before it reaches the market.

According to the World Bank, food loss accounts for 40 percent of all food produced in Nigeria.

ColdHubs Ltd is a Nigerian social enterprise that designs, installs, operates and rents walk-in cold rooms known as ‘ColdHubs’. The Cold Hubs can store and preserve fresh fruits, vegetables and other perishable foods, extending their shelf life from two to 21 days.

Describing spoilage as a wicked problem, Ikegwuonu’s ColdHubs concept is helping farmers and retailers preserve their produce for longer, reducing waste and ensuring farmers get better prices for it.

The mission is to reduce food spoilage due to lack of cold food storage at key points along the food supply chain, explains Ikegwuonu, who has won global recognition for his innovations in farming and entrepreneurship. In 2016 he was named a Rolex Award Laureate.

Social entrepreneur and farmer, Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, posing in front of one of his solar-powered cold rooms. Credit: ColdHubs

In 2003, Ikegwuonu started the Smallholders Foundation. This non-profit developed rural radio services, delivering information to improve agricultural methods and conserve the environment to more than 250 000 daily listeners across the country.

During a radio roadshow in the city of Jos, the capital of Plateau state in central Nigeria, where he was doing a radio programme on cabbage, Ikegwuonu realised many farmers were throwing away their produce because it was spoiling before they could sell it all.

“At that point, it dawned on us that there is no form of cold storage which is an important infrastructure for any outdoor markets for fresh fruits and vegetables. After some research, we built solar-powered cold rooms, and these were well received by farmers,” Ikegwuonu told IPS in an interview.

“Spoilage entraps farmers into poverty cycle because, by the time the food arrives in the outdoor market, the value has reduced, economically and nutritionally.”

Farmers and retailers rent out the walk-in cold rooms for a low fee of $0.25 (100 Naira) per 20kg plastic crate for one day. Each cold room has a capacity of storing three tonnes of food with other storage units that can hold 10 tons and 100 tons of food at a time.

Ikegwuonu said in designing the cold rooms, emphasis was placed on the solar power generation capacity to run the cold rooms every day of the week. The units generate energy from rooftop solar panels during the day. The energy is transferred and stored in batteries that run the cold rooms at night.

Currently, 54 cold rooms are operating in 38 clusters across two states in Nigeria, and Ikegwuonu plans to double the number in 2022.

ColdHubs have created 66 jobs for young women by hiring and training them as hub operators and market attendants. The ColdHubs, located in outdoor markets, serve more than 5 000 smallholder farmers, retailers and wholesalers in Nigeria.

In 2020, the cold rooms stored more than 40 000 tonnes of food which helped reduce food waste and increased farmers’ profits, according to Ikegwuonu.

“Farmers had commended the technology and have increased their income by about 50 percent before we started deploying ColdHubs. Now they are earning about $150 every month from selling the products that used to be spoiled and thrown away or sold at ridiculous rock bottom prices.”

Food waste occurs during industrial processing, distribution, and final consumption of food, research by the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition shows. In developing countries, food losses occur upstream in the production chain.

According to the Food Sustainability Index (FSI) developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit with the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition, food loss and waste need urgent action given its environmental and economic impacts. The FSI, which ranks countries on food systems sustainability – is a quantitative and qualitative benchmarking model measuring the sustainability of food systems in the categories of food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture and nutritional challenges.

Nigeria was ranked five with a score of 74.1 for food loss and waste on the FSI 2018 results for middle-income countries.

Spoilage of fruit and vegetables robs farmers of income while contributing to food waste. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“Tackling consumer food waste and post-harvest waste (the loss of fresh produce and crops before they reach consumer markets) will involve everything from changing consumption patterns to investing in infrastructure and deploying new digital technologies,”  the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition report noted, emphasising that ending hunger and meeting rising food demand will not be possible without tackling high level of food loss and waste.

Fruits and vegetables have the largest losses across developing countries, accounting for 42 percent of the developing country loss and waste globally, a report by the Rockefeller Foundation found, noting that growth in the commercial sale and use of loss averting technologies among smallholder farmers and value chain actors was an opportunity to reduce spoilage.

An estimated 93 million smallholder farmers and food supply chain actors are affected by food loss in Nigeria.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has urged for accelerated global action to reduce food loss and waste, with less than nine years to the deadline for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Seven years ago, global leaders agreed to the 17 SDGs, and Goal 12 specifically commits to halve by per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030.

Reducing food loss and waste contributes to the realisation of broader improvements to agri-food systems towards achieving food security, food safety, improving food quality and delivering on nutritional outcomes,” the FAO highlighted in marking the 2021 International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. The UN specialised agency has urged investment and prioritisation of new technology and innovations that directly address post-harvest food loss.

Investments to encourage African youth turning away from agriculture to reconsider opportunities in the sector is key given the need to generate jobs and repair food systems particularly impacted by the current COVID-19 pandemic, says Heifer International, which has promoted young, creative professionals deploying technology innovations to transform agriculture in Africa.

“Young entrepreneurs across Africa understand the struggles of their parent’s generation and have seen how this has discouraged the people around them from pursuing careers in the agriculture sector,” commented Adesuwa Ifedi, senior vice president of Africa Programmes at Heifer International.

With support from Heifer and the AYuTe Africa Challenge, Ikegwuonu predicts to expand from 50 to 5000 ColdHubs across West Africa in the next five years.

“Too many African farmers do not get the income they deserve because they have no way of keeping their produce fresh. We are revolutionising storage with our Cold Hubs and ensuring that farmers get value for their produce by avoiding spoilage,” said Ikegwuonu.

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UNEP estimates that 50 percent of post-harvest losses occur in vegetable and fruit crops. However, innovative agro-processors have found a way to process Morula fruit into jams and other products. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Nov 23 2021 (IPS)

When Bonolo Monthe’s neighbours discarded bucketsful of fallen ripe morula fruit from their backyard, she saw food and fortune going to waste.

Monthe took a tasty interest in the fruit of the morula (Sclerocarya birrea), a hardy indigenous tree that grows naturally across Africa. The morula fruit is rich in vitamins and nutrients, with eight times the vitamin C of oranges.

Monthe – a serial entrepreneur and agro processor – has turned the morula waste fruit into award-winning, low to zero-sugar preserves and jams through Maungo Craft, a social enterprise co-founded by Monthe and Olayemi Aganga in 2017. In addition, the company makes marmalades and sugar-free onion and baobab chutney.

Maungo Craft is helping eliminate food waste while providing delectable food and creating jobs in the agriculture value chain.

“We saw a great opportunity and decided to make preserves with the morula fruit that typically goes unused in Botswana,” Monthe, the Managing Director of Maungo Craft, tells IPS.

“Too many people saw morula as a nuisance. We saw an opportunity to come together and have some fun cooking jam,” said Monthe explaining that they saw an opportunity to make a little money at the local farmer’s market in the capital city, Gaborone.

“We learned on our journey that when it comes to creating cosmetic morula oil, cosmetic processors go through 300 tonnes of morula fruit pulp to get to 12 tonnes of morula cosmetic oil. We thought to ourselves, what happens to all of that fruit,” Monthe recalls.

As the world battles food and nutrition insecurity – more than 280 million people were undernourished in Africa in 2020 – food loss and food waste are a growing challenge.

Food waste is a result of overproduced food during industrial processing, distribution, and consumption. The food is never eaten and thrown away. Food loss refers to food lost at the time of cultivation, harvesting and processing and preservation. This food doesn’t reach consumers.

Factors driving food loss and waste include the absence of or poor agro-processing skills and facilities by smallholder farmers and poor and inadequate storage facilities, which means farmers cannot store perishable food or preserve it for future use.

Hot Sauce made from underutilised morula fruit. Credit: Maungo Craft

Inefficient processing and drying, poor storage, and insufficient infrastructure are instrumental factors in food waste in Africa, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations. The FAO estimates that in Sub-Saharan Africa, post-harvest food losses are worth US$ 4 billion per year – or enough to feed at least 48 million people.

In many African countries, the post-harvest losses of food cereals are estimated at 25 per cent of the total crop harvested. For some crops such as fruits, vegetables, and root crops, being less hardy than cereals, post-harvest losses can reach 50 percent, UNEP says.

Describing morula as an amazing fruit, Monthe said the fruit could be used for food and skincare products. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates the value of the global morula oil market to be worth $56.9 million by 2025 on a return of 4.4 percent.

Food losses for perishable crops such as fruits and vegetables exceed 20 percent, while for certain leafy greens and tropical fruit, the figure is more than 40 percent, according to the projections by the FAO.

A small percent of morula fruit is processed or value-added in Botswana, contributing to food waste.

Maungo Craft works with local vendors, from suppliers of spices to suppliers of fruit pulp, creating jobs for more than 1000 fruit harvesters in the value chain. Aganga explained that the company has mutual relationships with companies that use the seed in the morula fruit to make cosmetic skin care oil, while they use the fruit that would otherwise go to waste.

“Morula is an underutilised fruit also known as ‘orphan crop’ once integral in the food system,” says Aganga, Head of Production at Maungo Craft which has received 13 awards, including an endorsement of one of its products by Martha Stewart’s kitchen, an International Food Celebrity.

“The reintegration into our food system of fruits and crops like morula is integral in fighting and adapting to climate change. This, along with the delicious taste of many underutilised fruits, meant that using such fruit is of prime importance to us.”

Double Pyramid for Africa, food choices and systems that are perfect for people and the planet. Credit: BCFN

The Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) advocates adopting healthier and sustainable diets at local and international levels while mitigating climate change and supporting food companies.

Researchers at BCFN have designed a Double Health and Climate Pyramid that communicates features of a balanced, healthy, and sustainable diet by advising on the appropriate frequency of consumption of all food groups, like prioritising vegetables and fruit adapted to local conditions.

The Double Pyramid highlights the positive impact of nutritional balance on people’s health and protecting the environment. The Double Pyramid shows that foods that should be eaten more frequently are also those that have a lower environmental impact on our planet. On the contrary, foods that should be eaten less frequently tend to have a greater environmental impact. Therefore, within a single model, the relationship between two different but equally relevant objectives can be seen: health and environmental protection.

“Food represents the second most important factor of global sustainability (following the energy industry): it is, therefore, a priority for all concerned in the food production chain to reduce its environmental impact since whoever does not take part in finding a solution is part of the problem,” the BCFN comments.

Monthe said the company is expanding into the local market and eying export markets in South Africa and the United States.

“We shall also create new products for our customers to experience those underutilised foods,” said Monthe. “We put our ‘Culture in a Bottle’.”

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Women produce more than 50 percent of the food in the world but are disadvantaged when it comes to access to resources such as land and financial services. Credit: Busani Bafana, IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Sep 17 2021 (IPS)

Women, key contributors to agriculture production, are missing at the decision table, with alarming consequences, says Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg in an exclusive interview with IPS.

Giving women a seat at the policymaking table could accelerate Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and keep the world fed and nourished. This necessitates a transformation of the currently lopsided global food system, she says.

Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg.

Nierenberg, a top researcher and advocate on food systems and agriculture, acknowledges that women are the most affected during environmental or health crises. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global food production, affecting women farmers and food producers who were already excluded from full participation in agricultural development.

“We still have a long way to go in making sure that policies are not gender blind and include the needs of women at the forefront when mass disasters occur,“ Nierenberg told IPS, adding that policymakers need to understand the needs of farmers and fisherfolk involved in food systems.

“I think it is time we need more people who are involved with agriculture to run for political office because they understand its challenges,” she said. “If we had more farmers in governments around the world, imagine what that would look like. If we had women farmers running municipalities, towns and even countries, that is where change would really happen.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women contribute more than 50 percent of food produced globally and make up over 40 percent of the agricultural labour force. But while women keep families fed and nourished, they are disadvantaged in accessing critical resources for food production compared to men. They lack access to land, inputs, extension, banking and financial services.

“Until we end the discrimination of women around the globe, I doubt these things will change even though women are in the largest part of the world’s food producers,” said Nierenberg, who co-founded and now heads the global food systems think tank, Food Tank.

Arguing that COVID-19 and the climate crisis were not going to be the last global shocks to affect the world, Nierenberg said women and girls had been impacted disproportionately; hence the need to act now and change the food system. Women have experienced the loss of jobs and income, reduced food production and nutrition and more girls are now out of school.

“It is not enough for me to speak for women around the globe. Women who are actually doing the work need to speak for themselves; they need to be included in these conversations,” Nierenberg said.

“What happens is that in conferences, there are a lot of white men in suits talking on behalf of the rest of the world. But we need the rest of the world, and women included, to be in the room.”

A food system is a complex network of all activities involving the growing, processing, distribution and consumption of food. It also includes the governance, ecological sustainability and health impact of food.

Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted invisible issues, like the interconnectedness of our food systems, she said it was urgent to invest in regional and localized food systems that included women and youth. Food Tank and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) work collaboratively to investigate and set the agenda for concrete solutions for resetting the food system.

Divine Ntiokam, Food Systems Champion and Founder and Managing Director, Climate Smart Agriculture Youth Network Global (GCSAYN), agrees. While youth are ready to engage in promoting a just and inclusive transformation of rural areas, it was unfortunate they were rarely involved in decision-making, she said. They are excluded from the household level to larger political institutions and companies and need better prospects of financial security to remain in the farming sector.

“Young men and women need to be given special attention in formulating legislation to purchase land and receive proper land rights,” Ntiokam told IPS.

“International donors and governments need to invest in youth, particularly young women and girls, for their meaningful participation along with the food systems value network,” he said.

“Youth need to have a ‘seat at the table’, as they have at the Summit, in terms of decision-making on where governments and international donors invest their resources to make agriculture and food a viable, productive and profitable career.”

Researchers say current food systems are unfair, unhealthy, and inequitable, underscoring the urgency to transform the global food system. According to the FAO, more than 800 million people went to bed hungry in 2020, and scores of others are malnourished.

Jemimah Njuki, Director for Africa at IFPRI and Custodian for the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Lever of the UN Food Systems Summit.

For food systems to be just, there is an urgency to close the gender resource gap, says Jemimah Njuki, Director for Africa at IFPRI and Custodian for the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Lever of the UN Food Systems Summit.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will, on September 23, 2021 host the UN Food Systems Summit during the UN General Assembly High-Level Week. The Summit is billed as a platform to push for solid support in changing the world food systems to help the world recover from the COVID-19 pandemic while spurring the achievement of the SDG by 2030.

The Summit, the UN says will “culminate in an inclusive global process, offering a catalytic moment for public mobilization and actionable commitments by heads of state and government and other constituency leaders to take the food system agenda forward”.

“They (food systems) must also transform in ways that are just and equitable, and that meaningfully engage and benefit women and girls,” Njuki told IPS. She added that harmful social and gender norms creating barriers for women and girls by defining what women and girls can or cannot eat, what they can or cannot own, where they can go or not go should be removed.

“This transformation has to be driven from all levels and all sectors in our food systems: global to local, public to private, large scale producers to smallholder farmers and individual consumers,” Njuki said.

Leaders should enact policies that directly address injustices – such as ensuring women’s access to credit, markets, and land rights, Njuki said, noting that individual women and men need to confront social norms and legal prejudices and demand changes.

Njuki believes that current food systems have contributed to wide disparities among rich and poor.

“These negative outcomes are intimately linked with many of the biggest challenges facing humanity right now – justice and equality, climate change, human rights – and these challenges cannot be addressed without transforming how our food systems work,” Njuki told IPS.

“We are at a pivotal moment on the last decade before the deadline for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This must be the decade of action for food systems to end hunger.”

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The UNFSS hopes to transform how food is produced, packaged, and distributed to tackle food insecurity and wastage. Credit: Alison Kentish / IPS

By Alison Kentish
Roseau, Dominica, Aug 10 2021 (IPS)

The world has been put on notice that there is no time to waste in achieving the goal of food systems transformation.

Through Pre-Summit and national dialogues, scientists, policymakers, farmers, NGOs, private sector representatives and youth groups have been building momentum ahead of the United Nations Food Systems Summit in September. The goal is to ensure that the world produces food with greater attention to climate change, poverty, equity, sustainability and waste reduction.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is one of the partners addressing the urgency of food systems transformation for food security, equity, the global economy and COVID-19 recovery. Since 2012, the alliance of philanthropic foundations has engaged in global discussions, supported and led global food transformation research and advanced initiatives in climate, health and agroecology.

The Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) collaborates with the Alliance to share ideas and knowledge to design projects capable of guaranteeing a more sustainable food system for future generations.

IPS spoke to the Alliance’s Senior Director of Programmes, Lauren Baker, about the urgent need to overhaul food systems, the impact of COVID-19 on those systems and why true cost accounting is essential to the international effort to revamp the production, sale and distribution of food.

Dr Lauren Baker

Inter Press Service (IPS): The Global Alliance for the Future of Food has been on a mission to make food systems more sustainable and equitable. The UN Food Systems Summit has the same goal. What do you want to see the Summit achieve?

Lauren Baker (LB): Through the summit process, we have been committed to engaging a network of champions in food systems. We are championing systems thinking, transparency and accountability. We uphold the need for diverse evidence and inclusive representation throughout the process.

Our goal has been to bring the focus of research on one issue, which we think is a significant lever for food systems transformation, and this is being echoed by many in the summit process. This is the issue of true cost accounting.

Over and over across the action tracks, we have heard people emphasize the need for measurable and transparent approaches like true cost accounting to move us forward. What true cost accounting is: we look at the negative externalities of food systems that are not fit for purpose. The industrial food system has several significant impacts on human health and the environment. We need to take these into account, use that information to think differently and make different decisions that advance and uphold the true value of food and bring the alternatives to light.

There are many food systems initiatives proliferating around the world that are healthy, equitable, diverse, inclusive, renewable and resilient. How do we shine a light on those integrated benefits of food systems when they’re managed properly, and they’re not extractive?

(IPS): What are some of the food systems lessons you think we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic?

(LB): I think the Summit comes at this time when everyone’s awareness of food systems issues is heightened, and this makes the work of the Summit even more critical.

One of the key lessons has been just how vulnerable equity-deserving groups are in the context of this kind of global emergency. If you extend that into future emergencies that will come our way because of climate change, then we need to address those issues of equity and the social systems that lift people instead of making them more vulnerable in the context of something like a pandemic.

We have seen essential workers continue to be stressed. We have seen the impact of COVID on migrant workers, farmers and supply chain resilience. We have seen that the global supply chain through COVID, on the one hand, has been very vulnerable. On the other hand, it’s been durable, but there has been increasing interest because of COVID on resilient local and regional supply chains. Throughout the Pre-summit, I heard government officials and other actors emphasizing the importance of building and strengthening local and regional supply chains.

I think it’s just highlighted resilience overall – the idea of resilience and how food systems are connected to our other crises, like our crisis of inequality globally, our climate crisis and our biodiversity crisis. We now see that those things are intimately connected, and the solutions will have to be interrelated as well.

(IPS): How important is indigenous knowledge to this mission of food systems transformation?

(LB): In our work on true cost accounting, I think indigenous knowledge is very undervalued if you consider the true value of food systems.

Indigenous people historically have managed and stewarded their food systems and have knowledge that they can offer to the world. Their knowledge is very place-based, and I heard throughout the summit process about how important place-based science knowledge innovation is. That type of knowledge provides a grounded perspective, a different worldview that connects us to the places we live in different ways than we are connected presently.

(IPS): Food systems experts also continue to push for agroecology to be at the centre of these discussions. What is your take on this?

(LB): For me, when you look across the food system, agroecology is a systemic solution that brings forward all of these values that I was talking about in a really clear way.

Agroecology can improve livelihoods in terms of shifting from a system that has negative impacts to positive benefits. It is creative and knowledge-intensive. It is also placed based and ecological. It is diverse, so we need to uphold the importance of agricultural biodiversity and agriculture as connected to, wild landscapes too. Agroecology connects in a nice way to our wild spaces, to agroforestry, where biodiversity and habitat can be preserved and enhanced.

We’re doing some great work right now to assess using a true cost accounting framework, all of these agro-ecological initiatives around the world to look at their positive impacts on the environment, socio-cultural impacts on human health and their economic impacts.

We are excited to be launching that work at that the food system summit in September. We think it’s an important way to hold up agroecology, indigenous knowledge and the creativity in urban communities that we see around food systems.

(IPS): What do you think is the key message ahead of the Food Systems Summit?

(LB): One key message for me is just the importance of transparency in all of this.

How do we ensure that our global leaders act boldly right now and embrace measurable transparent approaches, systemic approaches, that actually can facilitate inclusive transformation as quickly as possible? We just can’t afford to wait!

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