Online Reporter
Obert Chifamba-Agri-Insight
FRESH produce does not fail in one moment. It leaks value across the supply chain — first through poor harvesting methods, handling and storage, then through trade decisions that determine whether goods stay sellable or get pushed into giveaways and disposal.
The BIG question is, therefore, not just why produce spoils. It is why markets do not absorb it, and when they do not, farmers are forced to sell quickly, accept lower grades or watch agonisingly as usable food becomes “leftovers.”
It is a fact that a good harvest does not automatically mean food on the shelves. In reality, there are numerous ways through which fresh produce can be lost long before it rots. This can be through price collapse, downgrading, and rushed selling that markets force on farmers.
Generally, fresh produce losses are best understood as the result of how fruit and vegetables move through a chain of handling, storage, trading, and buying decisions, rather than as a single technical failure such as spoilage during transport.
In recent times, trading fresh produce at mass markets seems to have become synonymous with dumping the produce in the precincts of the markets with rotting produce littering the ground in all directions.
Essentially, this translates into serious losses for the producers with stakeholders grappling with the reality of having to watch the produce going to waste with each day that comes. And when people quote global figures, as they try to quantify the losses, it is an attempt to measure a particular boundary of loss.
Losses usually become noticeable from the harvesting period to the retail or wholesale/market stages — while local conversations frequently mix physical spoilage with economic losses caused by price collapse, downgrading, and forced disposal.
The underlying reality is that fresh produce can be lost in at least two ways: it can literally rot or become unusable, and it can also become commercially unusable, even if it remains physically edible, because it fails to meet buyers’ quality expectations or because the market is too full at the wrong time.
At the global level, the most directly relevant estimate for fruits and vegetables is that about 25, 4 percent of the edible portion is lost after harvest, covering post-harvest stages through earlier steps up to retail or market stages depending on the model used.
This figure is reported for 2023 and is specific to fruits and vegetables, not to all food groups.
In contrast, for all food groups combined, the after-harvest loss figure is lower — about 13, 3 percent for 2023 — illustrating that horticulture, in particular, tends to be more vulnerable.
There is also a general “headline” understanding often summarised by organisations like UNEP that roughly 13 percent of food is lost after harvest along supply chains, although that is not produce-specific.
Poor handling, transportation delays, bruising, and insufficient cooling accelerate decay, so a portion of the crop becomes unsellable. But the economic channel can be even more decisive in shaping what finally reaches consumers.
When market demand is mismatched to what arrives on a given day or at a given grade, buyers ration their purchases, prices collapse, and large volumes are downgraded.
Downgrading is not merely an accounting concept – it is a commercial event that determines whether farmers can cover costs and whether product moves into fresh retail channels, discount channels, or processing. When farmers have no reliable pathway to redirect surplus into value addition, ‘loss’ becomes not just what spoils, but what is sold at give-away prices or what cannot be sold at all within the limited trading window.
Tomato crates and avocado bags, for example, are a perfect fit for this scenario: the ‘lost’ portion includes value destruction — how much usable product fails to retain remunerative value and therefore fails to be consumed as fresh produce.
Mismatch between production and market demand is often the first trigger towards produce losses. Very often, farmers trading their produce at Mbare Musika find themselves struggling to dispose of produce because there will be an influx of the same product.
The problem starts with farmers planting the same crop at the same time and harvesting it at the same time too. This is usually a result of limited forecasting, which sees smallholder production cycles coinciding triggering sudden spikes in supply. If buyers and traders cannot absorb that spike at stable prices, the market effectively dictates that only the best portion is worth paying for.
Everything else is pushed to lower grades or forced into rapid sale.
That economic pressure directly increases physical losses because produce often cannot be sorted and handled calmly under a ‘sell now’ or ‘lose it’ imperative – it is moved quickly, handled more roughly, and sometimes held too long in crowded conditions while farmers wait for buyers. Thus, economic mismatch amplifies physical spoilage.
On the one hand, poor market infrastructure then turns an economic shock into a large physical shock.
Without proper warehousing, refrigeration, ripening controls, and preservation facilities, as is the situation at the bulk of the country’s mass markets, the supply and quality window cannot be stabilised.
In many instances, the absence of cold chain or adequate holding capacity at or near the market means that a crop that would have remained saleable for a longer period becomes uncompetitive almost immediately after it arrives.
Infrastructure also affects how efficiently supply can be buffered across days.
This is the chief culprit at Mbare Musika where mounds and mounds of rotting fresh produce mark the order of the day while the producers struggle to remain viable, thanks to the subsequent losses.
When farmers cannot sell all their produce during one marketing day, the leftovers are supposed to be stored overnight for sale the following day.
If the second day’s demand cannot absorb the surplus from the previous day, leftovers remain on the books and in the markets until they face direct competition from the next delivery. That is exactly the structural problem behind the marketing practice where a market opens late and closes early.
The reality on the ground is that a restricted trading window forces farmers to bring full volumes into a compressed time slot, but also restricts buyers’ capacity to gradually sort and purchase at fair prices.
The result is predictable: some goods become leftovers, leftovers must compete against fresher arrivals the next day forcing prices to fall further after farmers downgrade them from viable to give-away.
The absence of value addition along supply chains closes what would ordinarily have become the escape route for farmers because they could have easily processed leftovers into products sellable at later dates.
Value addition is the mechanism that converts ‘unsold fresh’ into the ‘sold in another form’ products that consumers can always purchase at their time later. Processing —whether through juicing, drying, canning, freezing, or other methods — absorbs surplus that cannot be sold fresh.
