Macadamia Sector Should Re-think Food Conservation Strategy

 

On the 29h of September 2020, the world marked the inaugural International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, which was designated by the FAO on the 19^th of December 2019. Coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a time when wasting food is not an option. The ravages of COVID-19 are multi-sectoral, and basics such as food have not fared well either. It is therefore the best time to contemplate how to move forward with a view to significantly reducing the amount of food that goes to the garbage mound.

A Hungry World

The world food situation is a paradox. One of the reasons why there is a strong rallying of plant-based meats is the decision to attend to world hunger. According to the United Nations, 815 million people around the world are undernourished.  This means that a pool of about 16 times the population of Kenya is in the grip of undernourishment.  By 2050, the UN projects that 2billion more people will be in the bracket of the world’s hungry.

A Weighty Issue

At the opposite pole is another warning from the same world body, recognizing the burgeoning global obesity epidemic (globesity). Both conditions defy the general categorization into the developed and developing world, for malnourishment and obesity are prevalent both in the first and third world countries, even though in varying proportions. The same is the case with the wastefulness of food.

Trashed Food

According to TechnoServe, almost 30% (1.3 billion tons) of the food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa is lost before it reaches the consumer.  In addition to the social, economic, and environmental ramifications of this state of affairs, it is estimated that the global economy losses up to $ 940 billion every year.

It is ironic that the food wasted every year can feed 1.6 billion people, and yet 795 million people go hungry around the world. Going hand in hand with this is the negative impact on the environment. It is said that 25% of the world’s freshwater and 20% of its arable land is used to produce food that never gets consumed. Furthermore, food-related waste contributes to about 20% of global greenhouse emissions.

Trash Enough to Feed Entire Nations

In 2017, it was estimated that China generated 17-18 million tons of food waste each year.  That would comfortably feed the population of Kenya (around 50 million by the 2019 census) for each year. If these are dizzying figures, then the 60 million tons of food committed to the trash in the US should be maddening.

Kenya, a third world country, is grappling with rising cases of obesity, just as the developed world, while at the same time she is still gripped in the vice of hunger. According to a story appearing in a local daily newspaper in 2017, a report tracking food waste showed that the country lost Ksh.150 billion worth of food. This is estimated at 1.5b US dollars.

While the world still faces hunger and starvation, a staggering one-third of the food produced goes to waste. This is particularly worrisome given some of the ravages caused by accelerated farming activities aimed at increased food production. These include deforestation, drainage of wetlands, and soil degradation that accrues from the long term use of copious amounts of fertilizers. The most culpable players in this wasteful game are businesses that directly serve the consumer, which should be at the end of the supply and processing chain such as restaurants and grocery stores. Homes are also major contributors to the heaps of dumped food in a world where hundreds of millions are starving.

Fresh Look at Food Wastage

The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired new thinking in the food industry, which is aimed at seriously focusing on the perverse practice of food wastage.  It is irrefutable that the pandemic which has been rampaging since late 2019 has hurt almost all sectors of the world economy, and wasteful practices are part of the old normal that are being eschewed in the current dispensation. We could rightly argue that COVID-19 has come to accelerate what was inevitable. In China alone, 6% of all their produce is lost in the chain of warehousing, transport, and processing.

In the nut processing sector, it is difficult to conceive wastage. Macadamia for example presents a good example of avoidance of food wastage. While the nut is not a staple, it could be seen as not really presenting huge enough volumes that could present challenges in handling as say grains, cereals, and vegetables. However, even non-staple foodstuffs such as fruits also face the same predicament as the staples, when it comes to wastage.

 Macadamia Waste

Most of the macadamia wastage happens at the farm. When all the pests and other destructive forces are taken care of, the number one waster of macadamia nuts is the farmer’s greed. Avarice drives farmers to harvest nuts prematurely, and such nuts don’t perform well on the market. It is therefore in the farmer’s interest to harvest mature nuts. Metaphorically speaking, we could say that the road from the macadamia farm to the market is well paved and has very few bumps. As the top nut, the macadamia is so valued that the farmer will avoid all manner of spillage that would take place on the way to the processing plant.

In-built Conservation Strategies

All factors held constant, the top quality nuts that get to the processor get cracked. The resulting kernel will be classified according to acceptability. There will be the moldy, insect-damaged, and tainted kernel. All this will be categorized as rejected; according to the standards of the kernel that is fit for human consumption.

Macadamia shells are a good source of fuel, so they fly off the processors’ premises so fast. The blemished and insect-damaged kernel also has an outlet onto the local market and is what macadamia oil processors are looking for. The moldy kernel and all the kernel dust and flakes that result from the processing also don’t constitute garbage, for they are used in animal feed production. Efficiency seems to be the hallmark of production in this field. In this COVID-19 time, big-time players in macadamia have witnessed the rare phenomenon of nuts rotting in the field. For those companies that own plantations, it is a trying moment because of the slowdown in the global macadamia consumption and purchasing. Evidence of the severity of COVID-19 can be witnessed in the big farms where the pandemic-induced shortfall in labor and demand for kernel has made it not economically viable to harvest and process everything.

Global Food Conservation Strategy

Food Manufacturing reports that a coalition of major food suppliers in the world has committed to reducing their food wastage by up to 50% in the next ten years.  Even though, these are initiatives in the developed world; and in Africa, only South Africa is considered. In Kenya, similar efforts have been mooted, especially in the dairy and horticultural sectors.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN has also come up with strategies to tame the problem of loss of food, through the smart ways innovation. For the macadamia sub-sector, there is an even critical need to keenly consider this initiative, especially because of the seemingly frugal nature of the industry. Strength could as well be a weakness. While food wastage has been an enduring problem in other sectors of food processing the world over, the macadamia field has seemingly been well insulated through an all-consuming system that is averse to wastage. Now that COVID-19 just introduced a new lesson to all the players in the food industry, the macadamia sector shall be obliged to review and revise the game-plan, if regression into the abyss of food prodigality is to be avoided.

 

Written by Amadi Kwaa Atsiaya