"Focusing on food saved is as important as food produced"

What a simple and logical phrase which became the mantra of our study tour last week to India to explore a new UK-India collaboration for a first of a kind ‘Centre of Excellence’ to underpin the roll-out of sustainable post-harvest management and cooling at scale in India to support small and marginal farmers.

Without efficient physical connectivity, production cannot and does not translate into supply. More than 600M tonnes a year of food is lost between farm and market; 40% of temperature sensitive produce in many developing markets - much of it because of the lack of post-harvest management and robust cold-chains. As we plan how to feed 10billion people by 2050, reducing food loss has to be a key pillar alongside food productivity.

Alongside providing enough nutritious food to feed the world, we must simultaneously improve and protect the livelihoods of the hundreds of millions of small and marginal farmers who are essential to today’s global food system and must remain the major stakeholders in its future. 50% of the workforce in India is directly employed by agriculture, 66% in Rwanda. In Africa and Asia, farms smaller than two hectares deliver more than 70% of total food requirements.

The deployment of cold-chains does not just enhance food security, it also allows farmers to earn more by ensuring the quality of their produce and providing the efficient and effective connectivity needed to sell it further afield - reaching consumption centres in distant cities and urban conurbations.

But smallholder farmers can be earning no more than $60 a month in many markets. No matter how appropriate a shift in philosophy might be, post-harvest management and cold-chains will only be taken up by small and marginal farmers if they are affordable within the local economic context. For sustainability we need new radically innovative models which economically empower the marginal and small farmer - and create rural employment and resilience, in alignment with existing human backdrop and current on the ground reality.

As such, in developing economies, this is likely to require new business and innovative funding models, driven through empowered Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs), be they as Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) or co-operatives. Equally key is to enable small and marginal farmers through FPOs and other knowledge transfer channels to understand how to avail services of the integrated components of post-harvest management, cooling, storage and transport to gain the economic advantages available from cross-geography access, distance-price arbitrage, time-arbitrage and cross-seasonal trading.

And given the addition of what will undoubtedly be a substantial amount of energy consuming equipment and infrastructure to enable the movement of more food produce globally, we will also have significant environmental impact if achieved using today’s fossil fuel powered technologies. Given also the use of refrigerants and insulation in cold-chains, the sector is important not only for its effect on our ability to deliver the Paris Agreement on Climate Change but also for a successful outcome to the Montreal Protocol and Kigali Amendment. We need clean cold-chains

Cold-chains specifically can be an essential contributor to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals - not least SDG 1 (End Poverty); SDG 2 (Zero Hunger); SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being; SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action), the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol.

The key question we now need to answer is: “How do you create the local and global, temperature controlled “field to fork” connectivity to feed 10bn people sustainably from hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers whose livelihoods and well-being are often dependent on only 1-2 hectares, as well as ensure they are climate change adaptation ready and resilient .… all without using fossil fuels?