By S. Gustafson  (published on December 12, 2021)

This blog apprear originally on FoodSecurityPortal.ORG 

 Photo credit: UNICEFEthiopi/2020/NahomTesfaye

As Ethiopia’s population has become increasingly urbanized over the past decade, more and more households have come to rely on markets, rather than their own farms, for their daily food needs. This dependence means that well-functioning agri-food value chains have become increasingly vital to food security for much of the population. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic raised serious concerns about the resilience of these value chains; while Ethiopia never closed its borders or imposed full lockdown measures, efforts to contain the virus still had the potential to disrupt the agri-food system and negatively impact food and nutrition security. A new series of working papers from IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP) examines how two important value chains – the dairy value chain and the vegetable value chain – fared during the pandemic.

The studies draw on in-person survey data from February 2018 (for dairy) and February 2020 (for vegetables) and phone survey data from June and September 2021 (for dairy) and March 2021 (for vegetables). Comparison of these data allowed the authors to examine how value chains have responded and adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors used a cascading survey approach to collect and analyze data across the entire value chains, from rural and peri-urban producers to wholesalers and urban retailers.

Overall, Ethiopia’s dairy value chain appears remarkably resilient to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated containment measures imposed by the government. While nine percent of dairy farmers stopped engaging in the dairy value chain between February 2018 and June 2021, this decline can be attributable to rising feed prices, and potentially to a lack of access to credit and extension services, rather than to the pandemic’s impacts. Similarly, while 36 percent of milk wholesalers reported that they stopped trading dairy products within the study timeframe, they attributed this decision to increased competition within the sector and limited supply of milk and butter from rural areas, not to COVID-19. While a small number of urban retailers cited the pandemic as at least one of the reasons they stopped selling dairy products, the study found that the quantity of dairy products traded actually increased between 2018 and 2021.

Milk prices have risen steadily and significantly in Ethiopia over the past three years, matching the general high inflation seen in the country. Between 2018 and 2021, however, milk prices remained relatively stable (0.92 USD/liter in 2018 compared to 0.91 USD /liter in 2021). In addition, the amount that farmers received from the final retail price rose slightly during that timeframe. The dairy sector also did not experience a rise in post-harvest losses (as measured by quantity of milk wasted) during the pandemic.

While slightly more mixed, impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Ethiopia’s vegetable value chain also appear minimal. Farmers’ main concern was rising input prices; these price increases, rather than the pandemic itself or related containment measures, largely drove production decisions.

At the wholesaler level, the pandemic had more direct effects. At the start of the pandemic, the major wholesale vegetable market in Addis Ababa, the capital, was moved to the outskirts of the city to allow for more effective social distancing. Many surveyed traders reported that this relocation more negatively impacted their business than the pandemic itself. Between February 2020 and March 2021, most traders saw a loss in both number of clients and volume of vegetables traded, and the majority of these traders cited the relocation of the market as the cause.

Urban retailers also reported negative impacts from the relocation of the wholesale market. In addition, two-thirds of retailers said that they had fewer choices when it came to transportation of goods from wholesale markets than they did prior to the pandemic; while the majority of these cited the market relocation as the reason for this, 19 percent stated that it was due to the pandemic itself.

The study found significant volatility in vegetable prices throughout the study timeframe. The price of many key vegetables in household food baskets, such as onions, rose at the start of the pandemic, and many farmers initially responded by ramping up production to benefit from the increased prices. This in turn resulted in an oversupply in the Addis Ababa market, which drove farm gate and final consumer prices back down. All value chain actors—farmers, wholesalers, and retailers—reported that this price volatility was a major concern for them in the long term. It is important to note, however, that prices and price movements vary among the different vegetable crops. In addition, the volatility seen during the survey period cannot be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic with any certainty, as the vegetable value chain in Ethiopia is generally characterized by a high degree of price volatility.

Post-harvest losses along the vegetable value chain also varied by crop. The largest losses were seen for tomatoes (11.5 percent, while the lowest were seen for onions (2.6 percent). In addition, where these losses occurred also differed widely. Tomatoes saw the highest losses at the retail level, while nearly all of the losses for cabbage occurred at the wholesale level.

Overall, the ESSP surveys suggest that important agri-food value chains in Ethiopia remained generally resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic’s direct impacts.

Citation: Hirvonen, Kalle; Habte, Yetmwork; Mohammed, Belay; Tamru, Seneshaw; Abate, Gashaw Tadesse; and Minten, Bart. 2021. Dairy value chains during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia: Evidence from cascading value chain surveys before and during the pandemic. ESSP Working Paper 160. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134764

Citation: Hirvonen, Kalle; Mohammed, Belay; Tamru, Seneshaw; Abate, Gashaw Tadesse; and Minten, Bart. 2021. Vegetable value chains during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia: Evidence from cascading value chain surveys before and during the pandemic. ESSP Working Paper 159. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134768

By Luciana Delgado and Alan de Brauw published in May 7 2020

This post originally appeared on pim.cgiar.org.

Photo by Devrig Velly EU/ECHO

The SDG 12.3 target calls to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses” by 2030. It is already 2020, and the rapid spread of COVID-19 has raised – along with concerns about general food shortages - the threat of renewed food loss as the world’s food systems are being affected by quickly changing demand patterns.

To create better strategies to reduce food loss and waste, it is important to first measure them accurately and consistently. Measurement, however, is a tricky business. As discussed in the 2019 Report on the State of Food and Agriculture, assessing food loss and waste is not straightforward. It has been done using various methodologies, making it difficult to even compare measurements. Oftentimes, differences in results stem from how the loss is measured rather than from differences in harvest practices, storage, or other factors.

To help make estimates of food loss along the value chain clearer and more consistent over time, researchers supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) developed detailed survey modules that can be applied to different components of the food value chain and adjusted to specific commodities. The methodology not only incorporates components of the Food Loss Index for SDG 12.3.1, i.e. on farm post-harvest, transport, storage and distribution, processing and packaging; but it also includes losses identified at the pre-harvest and harvest level, thus capturing the entire value chain up to the consumer.

This methodology allows a quantification of the extent of food loss across the value chain using consistent approaches, comparable across commodities and regions. We can characterize the nature of food loss, specifically the production stages and processes at which the loss happens. Furthermore, it is possible to provide estimates of food losses in different ways: subjective estimates (based on self-reported data); quality attributes lost (inferior visual, tactile, and olfactory product characteristics); and reductions in value, or the price received per unit output (based on the reasoning that price differences of a product in the same locations and in the same time period reflect quality differences.

The methodology was piloted in Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia, China, and Malawi in 2016, followed by Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania in 2019-2020. For each country and crop combination, the specification of the survey was slightly adjusted to make it more relevant to the context. For example, in Guatemala, the instrument, adjusted for beans, included five quality categories (ranging from 1-2% to over 25% of damaged grain) and thirteen quality attributes (dirty/not clean, chopped, size (small), presence of weevils, acid odor, wrinkled grain, swollen from moisture, rotted by moisture, humid, damage by fungus, different colors, broken grain, other odors).

Across all value chains for which post-farm measures are available, we estimate food losses at between 6 and 28 percent of total production and total produced value. Loss figures are consistently largest at the producer level, which means that much less value is lost within the value chain between producer and consumer. Loss at the producer level tends to represent between 60 and 80 percent of the total value chain loss, while the average loss at the middleman and processor levels lies between 7 and 19 percent. figures are larger than those recently obtained by Kaminski and Christiansen (2014) and Minten et al. (2016a and b) due to the inclusion of qualitative loss, but generally much smaller than the oft-cited statistic that one-third of food is lost or wasted.

These results suggest that interventions to reduce food loss should concentrate on the farm link of the value chain, or close to it. It is important to target smallholders with techniques that help them grow food with more marketable attributes (to reduce value loss) and improve on- or near-farm storage capabilities. As Brenda Mareri, SNV, noted, “Understanding the extent of food losses at each stage of the value chain, and its causes, helps SNV and the civil society groups we work with better target our advocacy for solutions.”

In the time of crisis such as the world is living through now, it is critical to use available resources as efficiently as possible. Consistently measuring post-harvest loss can help prioritize the right types of interventions to make sure that more nutritious food gets to consumers who need it.

Luciana Delgado is research analyst and Alan De Brauw is senior research fellow at the Markets, Trade, and Institutions division of IFPRI. Alan De Brauw co-leads PIM's cluster of research on Interventions to Strengthen Value Chains and leads the cluster on Value Chains Research: Outreach and Scaling within Flagship 3: Inclusive and Efficient Value Chains.