Food loss and waste are emerging as a new global challenge with far-reaching implications. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, around 33 per cent of all food produced globally for human consumption is lost or wasted across the food value chain — from production to consumption. This figure is even higher, exceeding 40pc, for highly perishable fruits and vegetables.

Ironically, in addition to this, Pakistan faces another form of food loss where thousands of farmers deliberately rotavate (destroy) their mature, fruit-bearing vegetable crops almost every year. Unfortunately, this significant food loss has not been documented or accounted for in any analysis.

When a vegetable crop is cultivated on an excessively large area, exceeding the overall requirements of domestic and foreign (if any) markets, prices often plummet to such dismal levels during peak harvesting days that they fail to cover even the costs of harvesting labour, packaging, and transportation to the market.

As a result, farmers are left with no choice but to destroy their crops. This seemingly drastic measure is actually a rational response to the financial realities they face.

In a food-insecure country, farmers deliberately destroy hundreds of thousands of tonnes of crop

The high perishability of vegetables, the underdeveloped value-added industry that can process them for later consumption, and the limited availability of temperature-controlled storage facilities — with their prohibitive rental charges — are among the primary factors contributing to the market glut.

Driven entirely by the dynamics of demand and supply, there is no fixed pattern of such oversupply and market crash. It varies across different vegetables over different periods, year to year. Reportedly, tomato, white radish, Indian squash, onion, turnip, cauliflower, cabbage, coriander, and spinach are some of the crops rotavated in previous years due to extremely low prices in the wholesale markets.

Regrettably, such enormous food loss, amounting to hundreds of thousands of tonnes, occurs in a country ranked 99th out of 121 countries on the Global Hunger Index 2022. International organisations, including the World Food Programme, have already declared Pakistan food-insecure, and this is quite evident given that 40pc of the country’s children are stunted due to malnutrition — their own and their mothers’.

Compounding this issue, Pakistan is grappling with high food inflation, characterised by extreme price volatility and an upward long-term trend in food prices, rendering fruits and vegetables increasingly unaffordable for poor and lower middle-class segments.

Another concerning dimension of farmers’ deliberate food loss is the squandering of the country’s scarce and precious resources, such as land, water, fertiliser, pesticides, and labour. Surprisingly, such a massive loss of agricultural inputs, which diminishes the overall productivity of our agriculture system and also fuels food inflation, has not been documented or included in government reports.

Now, the question that arises is why it continues to happen. Can we do something to mitigate such a loss?

This seemingly drastic measure is actually a rational response to the financial realities they face

Generally, when a vegetable crop fetches high prices in a given year — due to reduced production or increased exports — more farmers tend to grow the same crop the following year, leading to an oversupply in the domestic market.

Since our vegetables have limited export potential and the export system requires significant lead time to respond to market changes, the excess acreage (if greater than a certain limit) exacerbates the oversupply issue, leading to a drop in prices and causing losses. In response, farmers reduce the acreage of that crop in the subsequent year, causing prices to rise again, thereby perpetuating a boom and bust cycle — a critical issue in Pakistan that hurts both consumers and farmers.

To our dismay, even when farmers destroy their crops, vegetable prices in urban areas often remain unaffordable because of multilayered intermediaries, who benefit the most from prevailing market dynamics.

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place, nor has any effort ever been made, to synchronise crop area with the overall demand for a particular vegetable crop, considering domestic consumption, value-added processing, and exports.

Due to the disconnect between farmers and buyers, farmers lack reliable market demand data at the time of crop sowing, while buyers remain equally ignorant of reliable production estimates at the start of the harvesting season. This information gap and lack of coordination lead to persistent imbalances and fluctuations in the market.

In several countries, this problem is partially addressed through contract farming, where farmers and major buyers (food store chains, processors, and exporters) enter into a formal contract before sowing begins.

This helps reduce price volatility (spikes and collapse). Moreover, in these countries, farmers’ marketing cooperatives, which handle local and export sales on a large scale, play a crucial role in enhancing farmers’ market power.

Another solution lies in real-time data collection. In Pakistan, the sowing season for a given vegetable crop generally spans one to two months, and sometimes even longer, depending on the varied agro-climatic conditions across the different vegetable-growing clusters in different provinces.

In the evolving agricultural landscape, it has become imperative to put a mechanism in place to collect real-time sowing data for each vegetable crop and disseminate this information, along with market demand, to farmers through media and extension services. It would enable farmers to make rational and informed decisions about sowing/planting a particular vegetable instead of blindly jumping on the bandwagon based solely on last year’s financial gains.

Thanks to the advancements in satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems, it is now possible to estimate crop acreage in real time with remarkable accuracy. Alternatively, data collection software and information and communications technology can be used to collect such data by deploying field enumerators.

Khalid Wattoo is a farmer and a development professional, and Dr Waqar Ahmad is a former Associate Professor at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, April 29th, 2024