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African Union Commissioner for Agriculture, Ambassador Josefa Correia Sacko said today in New York that the levels of post-harvest food losses in Africa are sufficient to meet the annual food needs of some 48 million people.
Speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, which has been taking place since last Monday, at the event organised by the ‘World Resource Institute’ to trigger actions to reduce food loss and waste, she said that the total quantitative loss of food in sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at 37%, equivalent to 100 million metric tonnes a year.
The Angolan diplomat stressed that regarding cereals, it is estimated that the value of post-harvest losses is equivalent to around 4 billion dollars a year, a situation that contributes to food insecurity and is the cause of more than 35.4 billion dollars of imports in Africa.
“We need to increase the availability of food without putting additional pressure on the environment and the economy to produce more food because the time has come to strengthen global commitments to collective action to catalyse investments aimed at sustainably reducing food loss and waste,” she said.
The Commissioner said that Africa’s agricultural development and food systems have grown significantly in the last two decades, as the agricultural sector is becoming one of the fastest growing in the world.
She said that despite these advances, challenges remain, especially in meeting the ambitious objectives and targets of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), including wars and conflicts on the continent and other negative impacts of climate change that have significantly disrupted Africa’s agricultural sector.
“Despite the efforts and progress made in several countries to achieve food security, the African continent is not on track to meet the food security and nutrition targets of the Sustainable Development Goal, concerning zero hunger by 2030, and certainly the targets of the 2014 Malabo Declaration to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition and halve post-harvest losses by 2025,” the AU Commissioner emphasised.
She added that investment in reducing food losses and food waste must no longer be considered optional, but an imperative for efforts to achieve food and nutrition security in sustainable food systems on the continent, adding that the African Union Commission (AUC), working closely with partners, has developed the Continental Postharvest Loss Management Strategy and institutionalized the All-Africa Postharvest Congress and Exhibition (AAPHCE) as a continental platform of mutual accountability that takes place every two years.
This congress, scheduled for 15 to 19 September 2025, will allow stakeholders and partners to recommit to specific sectoral actions that they will undertake individually and collectively to achieve the reduction of food loss and waste on the continent
In addition, the AUC has designed the Common African Agro-Parks (CAAPs) initiative, which is a cross-border agro-industrial development concept with enormous potential for increasing agricultural productivity through greater industrialisation of the sector, building strategic agricultural value chains, increasing agro-processing, reducing post-harvest food losses and expanding trade in the context of the AfCFTA agreement.
To ensure that this initiative is operational, the AUC is working with member states to start developing 10 cross-border demonstration projects, targeting selected strategic value chains and food corridors across the continent.
Two CAAP demonstration projects, namely those in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (cocoa), Zambia, and Zimbabwe (cereals), are already in the pre-feasibility stages.