Market Assessment for Productives Uses (Milling, Cooling) in Mozambique

Overview

Food wastage in agricultural value chain due to poor post-harvest processing, storage and transport is a growing problem which has a significant impact on global food security and eliminating hunger. As compared to developed countries, in developing countries most of the food losses happen post harvest and the losses are as high as 40% . In sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than one third of fruits, roots and tubers are lost post-harvest and per-capita food losses is around 120-170 kg/year . In Mozambique, for every 10 kg of food grown, at least 3 kg are lost post-harvest due to poor processing, storage as well as transport of the food. Thus, post-harvest technologies such as mills, dryers, coolers powered by renewable energy could significantly reduce the post-harvest losses and help to increase income for the farmers along with improved food security. Mozambique, where over 70% of the population depend on agriculture for livelihood, could benefit from these technologies to increase productivity along the agriculture value chain.

Productive use of energy in Mozambique is still very new and there are very few companies/energy programmes focusing on incorporation PUE in agricultural value chain. Solar irrigation is gaining popularity and there are few companies supplying solar pumps in the country and also few pilot projects (planned/implemented) from other energy programmes such as UNIDO and EnDev. For more information about market assessment of solar irrigation projects, please click here.

In case of activities like milling or cooling, the market is very nascent. There are only few pilot projects and this article summarizes the initiatives in Mozambique