Strategies to Reduce Post-Harvest Losses for Fruits and Vegetables

TLDR

Post‑harvest loss, reaching up to 50 % of fruit and vegetable production, threatens food security worldwide and is driven by issues during harvesting, handling, storage, processing, distribution, and consumption, making proper post‑harvest practices essential. This review investigates the causes of post‑harvest losses in fruits and vegetables and evaluates methods to minimize them. The authors synthesize literature on loss causes and mitigation techniques across the entire post‑harvest chain, from harvesting to consumption. Keywords: post‑harvest, fruit, vegetable, loss, DOI: 10.7176/JSTR/5-3-04.

Abstract

Post-harvest loss is one of the concerns of food security and global hunger in many countries. The extent of fruit and vegetable loss reaches up to 50 % thus, reducing fruit and vegetable loss and waste is the one of the leading issue for providing sustainably feeding the world’s population in the future. Major causes of post-harvest losses in fruit and vegetable occur during harvesting, post-harvest handling and storage, processing stages, distribution and consumption. Therefore, the use of appropriate post-harvest handling, packaging, transportation and storage practices is very important to minimize the amount of post-harvest loss. This paper provides a review which includes causes of postharvest losses of the fruit and vegetable and appropriate methods to minimize these losses. Keywords : post-harvest, fruit, vegetable, loss DOI : 10.7176/JSTR/5-3-04