Post Harvest Technology
Many people who exert influence and power inside the UN, the World Bank and other bastions of development theory and practice are still not convinced that the only way to eradicate hunger is through radical social and political change both within and between nations. Such people are therefore exceptionally receptive to the "technological fix" that promises painless progress and a solution to all the nagging problems within the existing economic and class order. The Green Revolution—the biggest post-war technological fix of them all—has proven itself a failure. One may still recommend its components, while employing a different vocabulary, but socially speaking, it is definitely out, passé. Technological fixes do not grow on trees and there has been considerable casting about for new ones since the World Food Conference. Post Harvest Technology (PHT) is a front runner and has drawn the attention of any number of distinguished development planners in recent years.
This is not to say that there is no problem of post harvest grain loss—of course there is. Its dimensions may, however, have been grossly exaggerated. Kissinger spoke of 15%, but four years later, the figures one runs across everywhere from the FAO to the popular press are commonly "20 to 40%" of UDC harvests lost in storage, handling, etc. It frequently happens that a person or an institution with good media exposure one day cites a figure which is then repeated until it becomes "fact." This is generally simple error, with no malice or conspiracy involved. Yet, at the risk of displaying here more skepticism than is warranted, I wonder if there has not been an exaggeration of losses for the furtherance of commercial interests. If it can be "proven" that peasants are lazy and hopeless at preserving their own harvests—then there is good reason for asking someone else to do it—in the present case, Western industry.
As one French scholar has put it: "There are no improvident peasants." It is indeed logical that people who have worked hard to bring in their harvest, and whose life depends upon it, are not going to leave it to the rats or insects if they can help it. Accounts of traditional village storage systems bear this out. "Granaries were an integral part and doubtless the cornerstone of pre-colonial agricultural systems (in the former French Sahelian colonies. ")81 Although many Western experts presented the severe Sahelian drought of the late 60's and early 70's as an extraordinary event, African peasants were accustomed to drought and to bad years and always took their likelihood into account. One particularly forthright French Colonial Inspector noted in a report on Upper Volta during the famine year 1932:
One can only wonder how it happens that populations . . . who always had on hand three harvests in reserve and to whom it was socially unacceptable to eat grain that had spent less than three years in the granary have suddenly become improvident. They managed to get through the terrible famine of 1914 without difficulty ... (However, since the late 1920s) these populations, once rich in food reserves are now living from hand to mouth ...82
The Inspector concludes that it is enforced cash crop production that has drastically reduced food crop reserves. But the point is that "backward" peasants had developed thoroughly efficient and sophisticated storage systems able to keep their grain reserves palatable for at least three years—until colonialism destroyed these practices.
Certainly much traditional knowledge has been lost because of such outside intervention; still the first step in reducing post harvest losses should be to consult the peasants themselves. FAO has a special $ 10 million fund to spend on PHT; the commission overseeing its spending hopes it will "give priority to actions to reduce losses at the farm and village level ... the type of improvements introduced should be simple, practical and based on the use of local materials."83 So much the better if they are—industry, however, already has ideas on the subject.
The Industry Cooperative Programme (ICP), until recently a part of FAO, wanted to:
tap the considerable ICP membership capacity... (and take steps to) make available advice and assistance to developing countries interested in improving their on-farm storage of food crops . . . Member capabilities in the packaging, storage, handling, transport and distribution of such foods should be brought to bear on any improved world system.84*
Happily or unhappily, industry has nothing whatever to contribute to on-farm storage in UDCs. Industry has no reason to understand local requirements or the uses of local raw materials and should better leave such questions to farmers and their families (with occasional help from the State). It also seems to be the case that industry has very little to contribute to larger-scale storage schemes. One FAO official who has thoroughly studied these questions writes that "ambitious storage and processing operations in some developing countries have apparently failed to play a useful role in the post harvest systems concerned." When he gets down to particulars, we understand why. Lots of centralized storage systems—the concrete and steel kind that are supplied by industry—have been set up with total disregard for the ways in which peasant societies function. Farmers would rather have their grain close to hand, they only sell to far-off storage centers if in dire need of cash; and even if they do have surpluses to sell, the local processor can frequently offer them a better deal than the distant central facility (if only because of transport costs). Central storage is a failure because it is under-used (only to 14% of capacity in one African country) but also because the moment it does begin to fill up, infestations and fungi spread rapidly so that actually more food is often lost in "modern" post-harvest systems than in "backward" ones. Centralized storage is also costly in terms of foreign exchange, provides almost no employment and its use adds at least 20% to the final cost of food to the consumer. On-farm storage, on the other hand, has a great many advantages—the farmer has experience and knowledge of local building and pest control materials, he provides his own labor, his family constantly oversees the condition of the stored grain, no money is spent on transport and next to none on capital requirements, anything that does spoil is not wasted but is fed to animals.85