Parliament to summon ministers over poor post-harvest handling

The Chamber of Deputies has resolved to summon the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources and that of Trade and Industry over poor post-harvest handling, marketing as well as value addition to agriculture produce. MPs want the ministers to give a timeline and roadmap on addressing the identified concerns in the agriculture and livestock sector value chains and be held accountable in the future if deadlines are not met. They reached the resolution on Wednesday during a plenary session after the Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, Livestock and Environment at the Lower House presented its report on the outreach activities it carried out to assess the agriculture and livestock sectors. The exercise started on November 27 and concluded on December 21, 2018. They discovered that is easily perishable produce such as vegetables and Irish potatoes have no proper post-harvest facilities and requested the government to set up cold room facilities as soon as possible. It also exposed that some produce is not processed to get value addition, or it deteriorates because of lack of ready buyers, yet there are people in various parts of the country who need the food. “There is no sustainable post-harvest handling strategy programmes to safely manage farmers’ produce. Storage facilities should be set up where farmers can safely keep their produce,” said MP Ignatienne Nyirarukundo, Chairperson Committee while presenting the report. A post-harvest assessment carried out in 2017 by the University of Rwanda, Rwanda Agriculture Board, and National Agriculture Export Development Board, showed that an estimated 40 per cent of fruits and vegetables in Rwanda was lost before reaching the end user. Paradoxes in farm produce supply, processing MP Leonard Ndagijimana said that sometimes one district has a surplus harvest yet in another shortage. “You wonder why such foodstuff cannot be supplied from one district to another,” he said. The MPs found some factories worked below capacity, like Kinazi Cassava Plant, Rusizi and Nyamasheke rice factories, and Soyco – a Kayonza District-based soybean processing plant, Burera Dairy, and Pembe Wheat Factory supposed to serve Gicumbi and Musanze districts. It further noted that some factories still had many products in their stores and have no markets for them, which was likely to prevent them from buying from farmers in the next season (2019 A) that include rice, cassava and maize. Most of locally produced maize is not bought by major food processing factories mainly because of lack of quality, such as being affected by aflatoxins - toxins produced by certain fungi that are found on agricultural crops such as maize stored in humid places or stored in poor conditions. They instead import maize from other countries. There is also grade two milk (which scores below 85 per cent in quality) which goes bad because milk processing factories reject it. It cannot withstand high temperatures that grade one milk (highest quality milk) is exposed to. “Such milk can be used to make dairy products like cheese, ghee and fermented milk. But the problem is that there is no developed industry to process them,” Nyirarukundo said. editorial@newtimes.co.rw

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Parliament to summon ministers over poor post-harvest handling