The Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute has said food security can be enhanced if the challenge of food waste is addressed.

The Director-General of the institute, Prof. Lateef Sanni, stated in Lagos that addressing food waste required collaboration among consumers, businesses, farmers and governments.

According to the United Nations, 17 per cent of the world’s total food production is wasted annually.

The UN also noted that the wasted food can feed 1.26 billion hungry people yearly.

The NSPRI director-general had said at an earlier forum, that Nigeria suffered from alarmingly high post-harvest losses, estimated at 20 to 50 per cent of total agricultural production depending on the crop.

He said that the losses represented billions of dollars in economic losses annually, with growing food security implications for the nation’s ever-growing population.

Mr Sanni suggested that effective reduction in crop losses and waste would aid food security, adding that everyone must come together for the efforts to be sustained.

He added that technology was a big part of solving the problem of food waste.

He said, “Storage systems will help farmers such that when they finish harvesting, there will be somewhere they can store their produce.’’

Mr Sanni explained that NSPRI, established in 1948 as the West African Produce Research Institute by the British, had been in Nigerian control since 1960.

According to him, taking a cursory look at storage and research, the institute has some level of successes in terms of research for storage.

He explained that some of the NSPRI’s efforts included production of a packing crate for tomatoes, mostly used in the northern part of the country currently.

“It is like your egg crates to pack eggs. We now have plastic crates for tomatoes. It is supposed to have replaced the use of baskets by now in the whole country. It reduces tomato losses by close to 20 to 25 percent during distribution, transportation and marketing,” he said.

The don added that the institute had also come up with a dust non-chemical storage for maize, soya beans, cowpea and other grains.

He stated, “This NSPRI Dust is a non-chemical treatment, which is safe. This treatment can preserve maize or legumes in the market for six months. It’s a research output, which is in powder form.’’

Mr Sanni said that the Hermetic Steel Drum was another storage research output.

He said, “This product is like the normal drum that people keep at home but which has been treated with chemicals. The drum can be used to store agricultural produce such as cereals, legumes and others, for nothing less than seven months, once you seal it up, nothing will happen to it.”

The NSPRI boss disclosed that it received orders for 1,000 of the drums from the Borno State Government and 210 drums from the association of farmers in Kano State.

He noted, “The technology is ready-made; just give it to all our small holder farmers, they take it home and study the instructions there. I want to call on our leaders and governors that they can key into some of these small, innovative technologies for their local government councils, to help the farmers so that when they finish harvesting they have somewhere they can store their produce.

“Otherwise they will not harvest, rather they will leave their crops on the farm and the implication is that they delay planting for the next season, then by the next planting season, they may not have enough of the produce to plant and they have to spend more money.

“But, if the farmers are sure that they have storage facilities at their beck and call, it becomes easier for them to harvest on time and plant another one, because they know that once they harvest they can store it.”

Mr Sanni said further that NSPRI had another storage system comparable to the large silos.

“We have large silos of about 130,000 tonnes in the country but these cannot assist our rural farmers. We have developed what we call two tonnes, five tonnes, 20 tonnes inner atmosphere silos. These can help empower the youth in Nigeria,” he said.

He urged each local government authority in the country to get these kinds of silos to empower their youths to venture into the business of food storage.

“Farmers can then take their produce to youths and store them. Five tonnes is not a joke in a local government. This development is better and maintainable, and we can easily train many people in the country to key into this kind of storage solutions,” the NSPRI boss said.

He appealed for more awareness and training about the equipment for farmers by extension agents, and encouraged the private sector to show interest by approaching the institute for further discussion.

“When it comes to food security and the need to scale up the best storage system, no matter how small the technology, it requires input from governments and the private sector. With the global recession, I will call for private sector initiatives to create awareness about some of these downstream grassroots-oriented research outputs which are useful for small holder farmers,” he said.

Mr Sanni stressed the need for farmers to have access to timely credit facilities, saying that it would assist them to procure some of these storage technologies.

He added that the private sector and government could also partner to produce the storage systems in large quantities and sell them across the country.

 “This is also an area where the Bank of Agriculture or Bank of Industry can come in. With these two bodies collaborating with farmers, they can afford to procure these technologies easily. The farmers definitely need these technologies. Individual farmers can afford some of these electric drums, but when it comes to the silos, they need cooperative groups, farmers’ associations and all those groups, to enable them access large storage facilities. This is an area where they will need credit facilities, if we really want to help them,” he said.

(NAN)