Postharvest assessment for the horticulture value chain of smallholder farmers, producing for local and regional markets in Guinea-Bissau

Abstract

Intro & Background. In Guinea-Bissau, deploying postharvest technologies could help reduce food quality loss, increase local food preservation and nutrition security for smallholder farmers, and improve their income.

General problem, knowledge gap. However, the effectiveness of any postharvest technology is dependent on the complex interplay of farmers, farm size, produced foods and their value, distance to market, business opportunities, transportation infrastructure, import/export dependencies, competing technologies, climate (change) and crop seasonality, financial accessibility, availability of technology, materials, facilities, and services.

Our objectives. We assess which postharvest intervention(s) is best to increase fruit and vegetable quality preservation and, thereby, the income for smallholder farmers in Guinea-Bissau (regions of Gabu, Bafata, Quinara).  

Detailed findings and advances. First, we generated and answered 20+ questions to map the target value chain concerning the target farms, farmers, crops produced, and markets. Second, we mapped the country's current situation concerning geography, population, employment, food and nutrition security, facilities, GDP, policy, climate, and the current situation for perishables. We identified trends and previous interventions. Third, we identified 40+ possible postharvest interventions, their current bottlenecks, and challenges they could solve. We scored the interventions and grouped them into three clusters: active cooling, passive cooling, and other postharvest practices. We detailed the most promising interventions.

Take home messages. The viability and added value of cooling technology are strongly linked to the location where they are placed (market gate vs. farm gate) and the volumes of fresh produce available. Cold storage rooms with a few metric tons of capacity are best placed at the market gates, serving multiple neighboring farming communities or vendors that store overnight. Transport from the farm gate to the market gate remains critical. Smaller cold storage solutions are more viable at the farm gate and can be tailored to the capacity needs of the farming communities. These scalable solutions include small fridges or homemade, custom-sized, insulated, cold storage rooms cooled with AC units. Small-scale passive evaporative cooling is also a viable preservation alternative. Postharvest practices are also promising, among others, improved harvesting timing for optimal ripeness at the point of sale and improved packaging and transport services.

Broader perspective and impact. A postharvest impact assessment is essential to develop and implement interventions that are sustainable in the long term for a certain use case. In Guinea-Bissau and neighboring countries, cooling, quality preservation, and energy supply are strongly intertwined. The future of cooling in Guinea-Bissau will depend on the future of energy supply and the evolution of urban and rural food value chains. A successful step-in of Guinea-Bissau into postharvest (cooling) solutions will likely involve low-tech, standard, and readily available hardware. There is a significant potential for evaporative cooling.