National Post-harvest Management Strategy (NPHMS) 2019 - 2029.

This National Post-harvest Management Strategy is a 10-year cross-sectoral document aiming at providing significant interventions that will reduce post-harvest losses and potentially offset the food deficit and achieve national food needs. The NPHMS focuses on food crops particularly cereals, legumes, fruits and vegetables, roots and tubers and edible oil crops. To achieve the goal, a number of strategic objectives have been set as follows (i) facilitate awareness on PHM to improve efficiency and reduce crop losses along the value chain; (ii) promote availability, accessibility, affordability and adoption of tested technologies and processes to reduce PHL; (iii) facilitate agricultural marketing systems to improve market access; (iv) promote research and innovations of new and appropriate technologies and methods to reduce crop losses; (v) review and put in place new legislation to ensure compliance with standards and adoption of practices to minimize PHL; (vi) strengthen institutional capacity, coordination, partnerships and stakeholders’ participation of PHM actors to enhance implementation of strategic interventions; (vii) adapt PHM systems to mitigate the effects of climate change; (viii) addressing inadequacy in PHM financing; (ix) develop a standard methodology for collecting data and estimating PHL in a country. In addition, it is necessary halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels.
To help eliminate food insecurity and malnutrition, effects of post-harvest losses reduction are (i) reduction of suffer food shortages; (ii) improvement of nutrition security by capturing otherwise lost nutrients and create accessible and affordable diversified diets; (iii) market food prices reduction. Moreover, building capacity of post-harvest actors will increase their income, and consequently their food and nutrition security.
To make agriculture more productive and sustainable, PHL will help to (i) enhance farm-level productivity; (ii) safeguard the utilization of production resources; (iii) avoid to produce food that will be lost and not consumed; (iv) lower unsustainable deployment of limited land, water, energy, inputs and other resources to produce products which are not consumed. Moreover, it is need to include PHM issues in agriculture research themes.
In order to enable more inclusive and efficient agriculture and food systems, the Strategy envisages the improvement and formalization of market access, also ensuring availability of specialized human resources to manage marketing infrastructure not to lose advantages of agricultural intensification.
The resilience of livelihoods to disasters will be increased by promoting interventions to reduce climate change effects affecting the effectiveness of Post-Harvest Technologies (PHT) for harvesting and drying, pest and disease management, and storage, such as 1.well-functioning agricultural innovation systems, and in particular, systems for growing and/or storing crops and varieties which are less susceptible to post-harvest pest attack; 2.timely harvesting and adequate and protected drying; 3.maintenance of the storage structures; 4.cleaning and hygiene; 5.increasing farmer access to market information and transport options; 6.usage of early warning seasonal forecasts to project how the climatic conditions might impact on food storage or marketing strategies.
As for the Governance, the overall coordination of this strategy will be vested in the Ministry responsible for Agriculture, in particular the Post-harvest Management Section, which is under the Division of National Food Security (DNFS). In fulfilling its functions, the Ministry of Agriculture will rely on partnerships and collaboration with key stakeholders including Private Sector, Civil Society Organizations, Community-Based Organizations, Non-state Actors and Development Partners.