Kenya’s Battle to Save Food Before It’s Lost

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 23- Every year, long before a single meal goes uneaten at a Kenyan dinner table, the country is already losing. Not to drought alone, and not only to disease outbreaks on the farm, but to something quieter and far less dramatic: spoilage.

Milk can curdle before it reaches a buyer. Trays of eggs can remain unsold until they spoil. Mangoes can deteriorate during periods of plenty, only for consumers to face shortages when the season ends.

At a recent agricultural technology exhibition in Nairobi, a veterinarian and a farmers’ representative arrived at the same uncomfortable truth: Kenya’s food security challenge is not only about how much the country produces, but how much of that production survives the journey from the farm to the consumer.

Kenya’s Postharvest Management Strategy for Food Loss and Waste Reduction estimates that approximately 30 to 40 per cent of food is lost between the farm gate and the family table. The strategy also notes that losses vary considerably by commodity, with cereals ranging between 12 and 17 per cent, while fruits and vegetables can lose about 22 per cent between production and retail. ([FAOLEX][1])

The figures place the problem beyond the farm and squarely within the systems that move food from production to consumption.

For Dr Ambrose Kipyegon, Vice President of the Kenya Veterinary Association, post-harvest losses represent one of the biggest technology gaps in livestock and poultry production.

“The biggest gap according to KVA in livestock and poultry production is what I would loosely call post-harvest losses,” Dr Kipyegon said.

It is a strange kind of failure because it happens after much of the hard work has already been done. The animal has been raised, the milk has been produced and the eggs have been laid — yet the food can still lose its value before reaching the consumer.

Kipyegon described farmers whose milk is rejected at the point of sale and poultry farmers who can be left with large quantities of eggs without a ready market.

For a country seeking to strengthen food security, he argued, reducing these losses is as important as increasing production.

His prescription, however, is not simply more technology in the abstract. It is a shift in approach from treating disease after it appears to preventing it before it causes damage.

Kenyan veterinarians, he said, are increasingly advocating disease prevention through surveillance and vaccination. The objective is to identify threats early and act before they translate into losses for farmers and weaknesses in the food chain.

“Surveillance guides the efforts of disease control,” he said.

Without effective surveillance, he explained, disease-control efforts can become less targeted because authorities may not know which diseases require attention.

The shift towards prevention also has implications for food safety. Kipyegon said reducing reliance on treatment can reduce the risk of antimicrobial residues in food, particularly where antibiotics are used and withdrawal periods have to be observed by farmers.

Technology is also opening opportunities for earlier detection of livestock diseases that can quietly undermine production.

Kipyegon cited mastitis and ketosis as examples of conditions that can be difficult to identify early but can be detected and managed sooner through appropriate technologies.

The economic logic is straightforward: the earlier a problem is identified, the greater the opportunity to prevent it from becoming a larger production loss.

Vaccination technologies could also make disease prevention more affordable. Kipyegon pointed to combination vaccines that can protect animals against several diseases in a single product, reducing the cost and effort involved in vaccination.

The same question of access, however, extends beyond veterinary technologies.

Enock Mutai, Head of Member Services and Project Officer at the Kenya National Farmers Federation, said technology could help farmers move from largely offline agricultural systems towards digital networks connecting them with markets, service providers and buyers.

He said digital platforms could help improve farmers’ credibility and make it easier for financial institutions to assess their economic activity by tracking what they sell, what they purchase and what they receive from off-takers.

The technology could therefore do more than connect a farmer to a buyer. It could create a digital record that makes farmers more visible to financial institutions and other players in the agricultural ecosystem.

Mutai said smallholder farmers are increasingly being incorporated into such systems through applications, cooperatives, farmer-based organisations and farmer producer organisations.

“Because if we are not factoring in the smallholder farmers, that means we are missing it all because farming is always about the smallholder farmers,” he said.

Yet technology cannot transform the food chain if farmers cannot afford or understand it.

Mutai identified lack of awareness and limited economic capacity as major barriers to adoption, particularly among smallholder farmers.

Many farmers, he said, are focused on meeting basic needs, making it difficult for them to invest in new technologies or even access devices such as smartphones.

This creates a paradox at the centre of Kenya’s agricultural transformation: innovations may exist, but their impact depends on whether the farmers producing the food can actually access and use them.

For Mutai, one of the most important solutions lies in value addition.

He argued that Kenya needs to find ways of extending the shelf life of agricultural products so that food produced during peak seasons does not simply disappear when supply exceeds demand.

He gave the example of mangoes from Makueni, which could be dried and stored for periods when fresh supplies are unavailable.

“If it is mangoes from Makueni, it should be dried and be stored somewhere for the time that there will be no supply in the market,” he said.

The idea shifts the conversation from simply producing more food to making better use of what Kenya already produces.

The federation is also working with farmers through climate-smart agriculture initiatives and its Acting Now programme to build resilience, including community approaches to water harvesting and storage.

The challenge, therefore, is not confined to the farm. It runs through the entire journey of food — from animal health and production to storage, processing, packaging and eventual sale.

Dr Kipyegon believes packaging could provide another important link in that chain.

Having seen technologies and innovations displayed at the exhibition, he identified an opportunity for greater collaboration between veterinary professionals and packaging innovators.

Once veterinarians ensure that food of animal origin is safe, he said, the next question should be how that food is packaged to reduce spoilage and remain fresh for longer.

“I see a point of synergy where once we veterinarians ensure that the product is safe, that the food from animal origin is safe, now the next thing is how do you package that particular product such that you reduce spoilage,” he said.

That connection between food safety and packaging captures the broader challenge facing Kenya’s farm-to-fork system. A healthy animal can produce a quality product, but poor handling, limited markets, inadequate storage or ineffective packaging can still undermine its value before it reaches the consumer.

The exhibition provided a meeting point for different parts of this chain, bringing together technologies and businesses from agriculture, livestock, food processing, packaging and manufacturing.

But beneath the technology displays was a more immediate question for Kenya: how to ensure that innovation translates into less food being lost and more value reaching farmers and consumers.

Their message is clear. Kenya does not only need to increase what it produces. It needs to become better at protecting, processing, storing, marketing and distributing what it already produces.

From disease surveillance that protects livestock before production losses occur, to digital systems that connect farmers with markets and finance, to value addition and packaging that extend shelf life, technology could increasingly determine what survives the journey from farm to fork.

The real test, however, will be whether these innovations remain within exhibition halls or become affordable, accessible tools used by the farmers and businesses responsible for moving Kenya’s food from production to the consumer.