Technical, economic and marketing assessment to determine the losses of Strawberry Fruits during harvesting in the West Nubaria region

Abstract

Reducing Food losses and waste is a key global challenge to ensure sufficient food for the future and to use available natural resources more efficiently,The strawberry is one of the vegetable crops with a great economic and social return, as it contributes to increasing income of the state, farms and employment, as it absorbs a large part of the labor from production to harvest, and provides the hard
currency resulting from the export operations abroad, The research problem is the high rates a loss of the strawberry, as previous estimates indicate that loss of the strawberry reaches 35% of the production, starting from the production to consumer, which negatively affects the economic and marketing efficiency, Research aims to estimate loss of the strawberry and identify the main factors responsible for it in the harvest stage and measure its impact on the income of the product. This study is based on the primary data collected from different farmers’ questionnaires to determine the percentage of losses at the farm level in the Nubaria region, The result revealed the average percentage of PHL for physical and mechanical damage in strawberry 50.91% of the cumulative post-harvest losses at farm level are unsuitable for exportation specifications nevertheless, it is used for local marketing and processing purposes. The percentage of strawberry rejected (discarded) which are invalid for marketing and processing (insect damage, rotten and deformed fruits) is 2.90 %,9.50% and 0.67%while quality characteristics, were TSS 8.1 %, fruits diameter 29.37mm and color 96.16%. The most important results were the indicators of return above costs and the return on the invested pound indicated 2.03 and 1.03
for each of them, respectively, and value-added per ton About 6,832 pounds, the loss of harvest operations about 6.9% per fed., with a loss ranging between 11.3 thousand pounds if selling to the local market and 31.6 thousand if selling to the exporter. The marketing efficiency also ranged between 44.7% for the third category(greater than 10 fed) to 53% for the first category(less than 5 fed), which
indicates the high marketing efficiency in the first category compared to the other categories, And results of the econometric estimate showed that the most important factors affecting on loss during harvest operations are number of years of experience, cultivated area per feddan, quantities destined for export per tons, and the quantities destined for the local market per tons, finally should include the
different actors from the farmers and applied good agricultural practice to reduce losses at the farm level, Therefore, it requires raising the awareness of those in the agricultural sector and stakeholders from farmers and suppliers about the importance of reducing losses.