3.2.3. Enabling Good Decisions by Creating a Market-Like Environment

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Del curso dictado por University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Global Postharvest Loss Prevention: Fundamentals, Technologies, and Actors

25 calificaciones

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Global Postharvest Loss Prevention: Fundamentals, Technologies, and Actors

25 calificaciones

This course provides an overview of the issue of postharvest loss of grains by exploring essential physical, technical, and social dimensions of postharvest supply chains and loss prevention methods globally. Each year, estimates suggest that 1/3 of all food produced is lost or wasted, making postharvest loss a critical global food security and sustainability issue of today. Key knowledge areas are presented including: -An overview of postharvest loss -Supply chain activities such as harvesting, drying, and storage -Economics and markets -An introduction to the network of actors working in this field We face the immense challenge of feeding over 9 billion people by the year 2050. To meet these demands, yields will have to more than double using the same amount of natural resources. In recent years, postharvest loss has been recognized by major institutions including the US government, the United Nations, the CGIAR Research Consortium, and several others as a significant opportunity to impact food security and improve livelihoods. Despite this increased attention, a lack of knowledge, technical capacity, and resources remain obstacles for stakeholders worldwide to act on these issues. This course will, for the first time, provide you as professionals, practitioners, and students, with a comprehensive introduction to postharvest loss processes and begin building capacity for loss prevention worldwide.

De la lección

Week 3: Solutions: A Prevention Framework for PHL

This module will introduce you to a conceptual framework for how losses can be prevented. Theories, methods, and case examples on prevention will be covered.

3.1. The Economics of Loss 13:36

3.2.1. Asking the Most Useful Questions 11:07

3.2.2. Tale of Two Cases: What Has Worked and What Hasn't Worked 9:26

3.2.3. Enabling Good Decisions by Creating a Market-Like Environment 5:25

3.3. Effective Extension for the Prevention of Postharvest Losses 12:55

3.4. Working in Subsistence Marketplaces 7:16

3.5. Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services 13:25

3.6. Understanding Subsistence Marketplaces 11:10

3.7. Designing Solutions 10:15

Conoce a los instructores

Dr. Prasanta Kalita
Director of the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering

My name is Steve Sonka.

I'm an emeritus

chair professor of agricultural strategy at the University of Illinois.

And I'm also serving as a research professor for

the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Post Harvest Loss.

Today I'd like to talk to you about post harvest loss but

more important about mitigating post harvest loss and

I'm going to take a bit of a systems perspective.

Post harvest loss is a result of decisions.

It's result of a decision to not adopt a technology.

It may be a decision that's not even thought about because

a small holder firm might not be aware of the opportunity.

It's about decisions.

We won't reduce post harvest loss without somebody making decisions.

So I want to talk just for a minute about enabling better decisions.

because that's how we're going to improve, that's how we're going to get improvement,

is somewhere, somebody making decisions that result in reduced post harvest loss.

So how can we enable decision makers to adopt practices

which result in sustained waste or loss reduction?

And so I underlined three important things there.

It is about people,

it is about people from several different, very different areas.

And I will talk about that in a minute.

When I say practices here I mean the practice that

sometimes involves adopting a technology.

Sometimes it is just a change in the way things are done with the same technology.

And then the notion of sustained waste loss reduction is that it

continues the practice, technology use continues beyond if there’s government or

donor's support, because that, that is what we want to achieve.

So who’s involved?

Farmers, villagers around the farmers.

The private sector, sometimes domestic companies,

sometimes multinationals, the government, and donors and NGOs.

All of these various elements are often involved.

Not necessarily all of them in one implementation.

But all of them are involved at some level in

the global effort to reduce post harvest loss.

They're all making decisions.

What are the decisions?

The decisions are about what practices to adopt and what system and are there

needs to change the system within which those practices would be used.

And then how do we make those?

Well, I've already mentioned the notion that where we've seen success and

we're actually working on a very large project for

the Rockefeller Foundation's initiative in food waste and loss in Africa.

While we've been looking for successes around the world, we tend to see this

market-like environment, market-like forces being part of that system,

part of that structure which leads to intervention whether that

intervention is at harvest or storage or drying, somewhere along the chain.

All of these involved learning.

And let's just look a minute at learning.

And in the 1990s we spent a lot of time thinking about learning as

an organizational process.

Unfortunately with post harvest loss we'd not had as much organizational learning.

We've had learning within projects, we've not done so well learning across projects.

But we know how to do that.

We know that learning involves observation.

We see grain laying along the road in Modagrosa.

That's observation.

We document that, we do analysis, we've developed better

methods hopefully by looking at the system and then, we implement them.

Importantly, this is a process, it is not a one time through the cycle you're done.

The Swiss one time from the cycle we're long way from where they ended up

in terms of their implementation in Central America.

Learning has to occur and we need to have better means, in my opinion,

we need to have better means for learning to occur across the many projects

that are occurring today in global agriculture.

How do we enable better decisions then?

We provide access to consistent frameworks and tools, and

we facilitate best practice learning.

I think it's relatively easy to be optimistic.

I think we can make great progress.

We are making great progress in reducing post harvest loss and

we're seeing more and more system wide adoption of technologies

where it's not the technology, it's the technology in the context of the system

that exists and needs to change, which results in reduction of post harvest loss

to improve farmer income, to reduce environmental impact.

And to sustain economic development across villages

in many parts of the developing agriculture.

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