Abstract:
In meeting a country’s economic development in general and fulfilling the need of consumers
in particular, boosting the production by itself is not enough unless what has been produced is
properly managed. In Ethiopia, significant amount of food is lost along the post-harvest
handling chain, though not found recorded and there has not been much emphasis given to
understand the real causes of these losses. In view of this, a detailed assessment of postharvest losses of tomato along the supply chain and the associated factors were evaluated in
four purposively selected districts of East Shewa Zone of Ethiopia using Commodity System
Assessment Methodology from “farm-to-fork”. The objectives were assessing the status of
postharvest losses of tomato along the supply chain and the associated factors in the pursuit
of recommending appropriate mitigation strategies. Basic information was gathered from a
total of 408 sampled chain actors (producers to consumers) and related institutions. The
assessment was accompanied by focus group discussion (FGD) with key informants to extract
realistic information. The collected data were subjected to computer software programs;
SPSS 16.0. The results revealed that a loss of 20.45%, 8.63%, 2.93%, and 7.30% at producer,
wholesalers, retailers, and hotel and café level was recorded respectively resulting in a total
loss of 39.31% from harvesting to consumer. The loss in the districts ranged from 17.20-
33.30%, significant losses being from Lume district (p<0.01) which might attributed to the
absence of stacking of plants in the field together with the market problem. Field,
transportation and market display were major points of losses of tomato; significant losses
being observed right from field (p<0.01). There was no proper care and handling of the
commodity regardless of its high production in the study area. Market fluctuation, climatic
problems, perishable nature of the crop, no/poor sorting and mixed handling of the crop
found to be major causes. Lack of awareness and technology, carelessness on the loss and its
impact, involvement of so many intermediaries in the market chain, and others are major
factors, which need improvement. This piece of work recommends that farmers in these
districts require proper and extensive training on how to reduce tomato losses especially
through introduction of pre-and post-harvest best practices like cultural practices, harvesting,
sorting & grading, using proper packaging, transporting and cooling. Awareness creation on
the effect of every single cause of loss and minimizing the economic loss is advisable. Market
settlement through creating suitable marketing environment so that producers can harvest
and supply to market with tomatoes of optimum maturity so that exaggerated price fluctuation
and selling offhand are avoided and losses are reduced. The findings clearly showed the
existence of high post-harvest loss of tomato in the study districts and hence it is an urgent
agenda to device appropriate strategies including provision of tailored training for the
different actors in the production and supply chain and creating access to affordable and
appropriate technologies.