Broken logistics leaves the poor hungry

Lack of transportation, storage and processing facilities result in losses of some US$4 billion a year in grain crops alone for farmers in Mozambique and other sub-Saharan countries. This is enough to feed 48 million people a year, according to Feed the Future, the US government’s global hunger and food security initiative. Mozambique is among those most affected by the loss because its agriculture sector supports 70% of jobs in the country, according to the African Development Bank Group. It attributes the main causes of post-harvest loss to transportation in open, unrefrigerated trucks, and lack of storage and processing equipment. These factors create an opportunity for logistics companies to take a more proactive role in supporting local small-scale agriculture. “Agricultural productivity has shown very slow or even zero growth rates in recent years, and thus production of food crops has remained weak. In addition, climate change-related weather shocks have harmed harvests, particularly within the central provinces,” according to a Bertelsmann Stiftung report on Mozambique. The challenge is recognised by government, and high-priority sectors such as agricultural production, employment by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and human and social development currently account for 66.7% of the national state budget, according to the report.