Your contribution in collecting and describing existing postharvest loss (PHL) assessment methodologies can make the difference! 

After the consultation undertaken to get CoP members’ insights about the preferred topics of discussion, a new thread has been launched on “Collecting and describing existing postharvest loss (PHL) assessment methodologies”.

It is recognized that assessing losses to orient interventions, raise awareness and ultimately reduce food losses is very important.  Policy and decision makers, value chain actors including smallholders, and supporting organizations (financial and non-financial) can better address the PHL issues benefiting from reliable data and figures. In addition, monitoring and evaluating the results of all the efforts to reduce losses concretely undertaken need to be based on appropriate assessments. Worldwide, the different actors have used several PHL assessment methodologies, whose differences lay on many factors.

The new online discussion serves to consolidate a better understanding of the current assessment practices. The discussion will last three months and starts with sharing information on existing methodologies as used and known by the CoP members. New questions will follow with the aim to further analyse the advantages and limitations of each methodology (in the second month) and, then, to identify compatibility and aggregation of the obtained results (third month).

Please, login to the CoP website and leave your post. Furthermore, feel free to invite interested practitioners and experts to join the CoP and contribute with their experience in order to boost the community and contribute in building-it up.

Finally, we want to inform you that the first online discussion launched in October 2014 on food losses along the maize value chain closed at the end of January. A Report is available in the FORUM Archive, and soon will be also available in French and Spanish.