Ep 05 | Adopting progressive cooling solutions to overcome institutional food losses in Gokarna
Channel: SELCO Foundation
Date: 2023-04-26

#EnergyforCooling

Up to 1/5th of perishable products such as fruits and vegetables are lost during post-harvesting stage - In India, farmers incur INR 92,651 crores per year in post-harvest losses and around 50% of food is wasted in Sub Saharan Africa before it reaches the customer. The primary causes are poor storage and transportation facilities. Especially absence of investments in cold-storage at farm-gate for smallholder farmers (where majority of India’s storage capacity is owned and utilised by processors, retailers and exporters). 

Cash crops or high-value commodities when coupled with strong and fixed market linkages provide for much higher utilisation of the cold storage and hence are operationally more viable. Low-value commodities like vegetables do provide social impacts and a significant reduction in wastage to poorer small and marginal farmers; However, they are highly affected by external factors for success - like market price volatility, presence and ownership over logistical networks, distances to markets, maturity of the farmer group and its linkages and so on.

Outlined in this film series are reported experiences of farmers, producer groups, institution heads and entrepreneurs in running and managing distributed agriculture cooling solutions.