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.
