Pioneering project estimates nutritional losses

The two-year project, led by the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) at the University of Greenwich, is being carried out in partnership with scientists from the University of Zimbabwe, the National Agricultural Research Laboratories in Kawanda, Uganda (NARL), the International Potato Center (CIP), and Purdue University and Iowa State University in the United States.

“The team’s first step was to hold an open consultation on nutritional losses. Over four hundred agriculture and nutrition experts from more than 50 countries were invited to take part in a survey focussing on key nutrients. The data gathered from this survey will be used to shape the research and will be integrated into the design of a predictive tool being developed through the project.” NRI’s Dr. Aurélie Bechoff Food and Nutrition Specialist, who is leading the project. 

Nutri-P-Loss will work alongside APHLIS, the African Postharvest Losses Information System, created in 2010 by NRI and partners. APHLIS is a scientific model producing calculated estimates of postharvest losses of food crops across sub-Saharan Africa. Through APHLIS+, a project led by Dr Bruno Tran (AfricaRice and NRI), a new and improved version of the information system is being developed, covering more crops and types of data, including nutritional loss.

The project comes under the research initiative known as ‘IMMANA’ or ‘Innovative Metrics and

Methods for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions’, funded with UK Aid from the UK government through the Department for International Development (DFID) and coordinated by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH).