Overview
This project aimed to identify and characterise the nature and scale of food and nutrition loss in urban agrifood chains in Lusaka City and define its drivers and implications.
The report presents activities, outcomes, and analysis of the gathered materials based on the combined efforts of researchers, stakeholders, and several partners. Key contributors include among others: smallholder farmers, food marketers and distributors, transporters, local government officials, central government officials, and civil society organisations.
The findings indicate:
- significant fresh food and nutrition losses are occurring at all the critical between harvest and marketing stages — harvest, post-harvest, transportation, and informal food markets — of the urban agrifood chains in the Lusaka city region
- food loss in the urban agrifood chains in Lusaka is very high and a major contributor to low profitability for smallholder farmers, high loss of quality in the food supplied to the consumers in the cities, and low nutrition value of the food available on the market. Thereby, food loss directly affects all actors in urban food chains in Lusaka. Green leafy vegetables record the highest losses at 35% of the food produced while Tomatoes stand at 30% of the total production. Meat and Milk experienced losses of 22% and 7% respectively
- the highest proportion of the losses are incurred at the harvest stage.
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