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DHAKA, Oct 15, 2024 (BSS) - Noted agriculture researchers have called  for reducing post harvest losses of crops along with food wastage at different stages from growers to consumers as it’s a major threat to country's food security.

The country is now incurring about 16 million tones of food grains due to post harvest loss annually, the agriculture experts said.

Bangladesh has significantly improved food production in the last few decades and increased the per capita food availability, but the post harvest losses and food wastages posing vulnerable situation for overall food achievement.

In the last two decades from the year 2000 to 2023, rice production has increased by 62 per cent, Maize by 542 percent, Potato by 225 percent, pulses by 144 percent, oilseeds by 310 percent and vegetables by 197percent.

But post harvest loss for rice by 12 percent, Maize 13, potato 20, pulses and oilseeds 15 each and vegetable 25 percent, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture.

In case of milk production, the post harvest loss is 9.07 percent as the country incurs a loss of 1.28 million tonnes every year. The post harvest loss for meat production is 6.9 percent, 7 percent for fish production and 12.9 percent for egg production, the statistics showed.

One-third of Bangladesh's horticultural products, mainly vegetables and fruits, go to waste due to lack of post-harvest management, including facilities of preservation and storage, and a proper system of transportation, said Dr Md Harunur Rashid, director of SAARC Agricultural Centre (SAC).

Officials from the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) said the growth rate of fruits and vegetables has been increased almost ten percent but their post-harvest wastage became an issue of immense concern and they have no solution in this regard yet.

Bangladesh is one of the top producers of rice, potato, jackfruit, mango and guava in the world, according to the DAE and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In FY2019-20, Bangladesh ranked fourth in the world in rice production with 5.26 crore tones and in production of vegetables, the country ranks third in the world with 1.6 crore tonnes per year. It ranks sixth in potato production with 1.2 crore tonnes .

Bangladesh ranks second in jackfruit production with 10 lakh tonnes in a year while the eighth largest producer of mangoes with an annual production of 24 lakh tonnes.

Post-harvest wastage in Bangladesh deprives the growers of maximizing profit despite their hard labour, the agri-experts opined.

Fruits and vegetables are the most vulnerable to be wasted agricultural products in Bangladesh as those contain a lot of water, said Hafizul Haque Khan, chief scientific officer at the post-harvest division of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.

"There is no planned management for storage, preservation and transportation for these produces from growers' to consumers' level," he said.

Khan added that "It is not possible to give a complete idea about the specific size of the damage," Scientist Harunur Rashid suggested to invest in developing robust cold chain infrastructure to tackle the prost-harvest challenges.

More than 400 cold storages with a combined capacity of 60 lakh tonnes have been operating across the country those are mainly used to store potatoes. Such cold storages are not fit for storing fruits and vegetables..

There is a privately-owned special cold storage with a capacity of 1,000 tonnes at Tejgaon in the city which stores only imported fruits. There is another specialized cold storage for vegetables and fruits with a capacity of 120 tonnes near Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, which is only used by exporters.

In such a situation, the Department of Agricultural Marketing has taken an initiative to set up 25 specialised cold storages across the country with a combined capacity of storing 3,000 tonnes of vegetables or fruits.

The project is expected to be implemented by December 2024 at a cost of Tk 270 crore with the government funding (GOB).

Dr Fatema Wadud, director of the Department of Agricultural Marketing (Crop Loan and Warehouse Management), said each of the proposed cold storages will have a capacity between 300 tonnes and 500 tonnes. The total storage capacity of all the cold storages will be 3,000 tonnes.

As per 12.3 of the SDGs, it calls for the halving by 2030 of per-capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and the reduction of food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses.