Israeli technologies could boost SA agriculture

The trade office of the Israeli embassy in South Africa, together with the Fresh Produce Marketing Association’s South Africa office, jointly hosted the Virtual Agritech Roadshow to South Africa 2020. This webinar showcased several new Israeli-developed agricultural technologies. Lloyd Phillips reports on three new systems designed to improve efficiency and cut food wastage.

- Lloyd Phillips

While the global agriculture sector must produce significantly more food and fibre for the world’s rapidly growing population, there is great concern that the food value chain currently wastes about 1,3 billion tons of the food produced every year. This is not only extremely counterproductive to achieving production targets, but according to the 2018 US ‘Food waste investment report’, it loses the international food value chain around US$3 trillion (about R51 trillion) in potential profits, and unnecessarily wastes or pollutes the planet’s already scarce natural resources.

A 2017 report by the World Wide Fund for Nature South Africa revealed that this country’s food value chain wasted about 10 million tons of food annually.

“Of this, fruit, vegetables and cereals account for 70% of the wastage and loss, primarily throughout the food supply chain, from farm to fork. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has valued this loss at R61,5 billion,” the report stated.

The water used to produce this wasted food would fill more than 600 000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

MINIMISING FOOD WASTAGE

In 2017, having become keenly aware of the food waste crisis, Israel-headquartered company Trellis began working closely with international food and beverage producers to help predict their sourcing requirements from growers and accurately manage their supply chain operation.