Mango Glut Overloads Brisbane Garbage System – Gluts in Africa are Critical and Need Solutions
While Brisbane’s waste removal system battles to discard perfectly good mangos, this contrasts starkly with the difficulties and opportunities associated with agricultural produce gluts in poor communities in rural Africa.
Brisbane Mangoes
So good is the mango harvest this year, that residents of Brisbane’s suburbs are battling to get rid of their excess mangos.
Apparently some trees are dropping up to 60 mangoes overnight. If these are simply placed in rubbish bins they are too heavy for the mechanical garbage trucks and get left on the street. Normally there would be a $24 fee to get a garbage truck to come back and empty the bin, but the City Council has agreed to waive this cost so long as residents first remove the mangoes. The Council has also removed the charge for dumping mangoes at the city’s transfer stations.
So in Australia the fuss is about getting the mangoes to the dump and not about the waste of food or the loss of income opportunities, that bother the African.Thohoyandou’s Mangoes (South Africa)
An elder of the community pleaded to CSIR, for a scientific solution to their problem which he explained in a typical relaxed but serious manner. When the mangos first ripened the household was happy to have something to eat but soon tired of mangoes and gave them to neighbours who also tired of them after first being happy to get free food. So the mangoes were given to the pigs who prospered until they got tired of them after which they simply lie where they fall and rot.
With the community being poor and many people not eating properly, he was pleading for help to avoid this loss.
Ghana’s Tomatoes
Farmers in the centre of Ghana are caught in a situation where there tomatoes ripen at the same time and there are no processing facilities. They therefore have to sell to “Market Queens” who control much of the trading in cities like Kumasi and Accra and finance the transport of produce from the farms. The price received by farmers at the peak of the season has been shown to be 47 times lower than that in the middle of the dry season.
Hoedspruit’s Grapefruit (South Africa)
Recently in Hoedspruit, where the citrus farmers protect their fruit with electric fences and patrolling guards, the grapefruit was picked and dropped to the ground. This because the Japanese market had dropped and the local prices were to low to justify packing and transporting the fruit.
So in an area where farmers have to guard their crops from theft by the poor and hungry, there is still waste at times of overproduction.
West African Mangoes
Working in Senegal and Ghana the stories of excess fruit from household trees and untended mango plantations were repeated to me over and over. A BBC article looks photographically at mangos in Mali and finds the excess in good season a real waste. Spore, an international development agency, notes the effect infrastructure has on the potential of ACP countries to export and recommends processing as a way of supporting export, noting that only 0,22% of the worlds mangos are processed.
So in Africa the consequence of produce gluts is different. Selling fruit and vegetables is often the only way “subsistence” farmers have of making money they need, while the seasonality reduces the availability of food and effects nutrition.
The Issue is to Find a Solution?
This is very much a logistics problem – lots of wasted produce is spread over a wide area and only available for a short harvest period. Many attempts have been made from many different angles but a sustainable solution that can be replicated does not seem to have been found.
The conventional solutions like consolidation and export, value addition processing and drying have often failed in the poor rural areas where the need is most and the resources, infrastructure, finances and expertise is most lacking.
What is needed is either to “industrialise” (infrastructure, skills, sustainability, finance, business) these areas or develop innovative solutions that match the circumstances, possibly based on local pre-processing to preserve the products thereby eliminating the influence of seasonality and geographic spread.
Photo by Midori on Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License
They say “let sleeping dogs lye (lie ?) “, but how many un-employed would it take to make racks, then gather-up fruit and put out on the racks to dry in the sun ?. Maybe if it was a “Green project” they would prick their ears up ?
“Stuff in in the garbage” – “burn it in the power plant” – the reaction of a carbon-rich bunch of zombies that don’t deserve to live !
Food preservation is a basic SUSTAINABLE strategy.
Not preserving this food is rediculous.
In farming communities in America, years ago, the schools would close down when the crops had to come in.
The point is that their was a strategy.
I checked on the prices for dried mongoes in bulk on the web. The cheapest large order was a little over 3 dollars a pound when ordering at least 20 to 44 pounds at a time. But other organic dried mangoes where from 9 to 11 dollars a pound when ordering at least 20 to 40 pounds.
I checked an international exporter that ships in 20 foot containers. A full container sells for over 3.60 dollars a pound.
The advantage of selling dried fruit is that it will last for a very long time as long as it is done carefully and professionally.
Here is a link to learning the basics of Mango drying. http://www.iufost.org/publications/books/documents/Mercer_1.pdf
This is a beautiful opportunity for a large scale Cooperative that would make Trade Grade Dried Mangoes, storage and sale.
In the short term mangos could be dried or canned by the families or locally in groups.
the greed is sickening. theyd rather let it rot then give it to the poor and starving.
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looks like they called it off: http://digg.com/general_sciences/Bizarre_pig_snow_burial_experiment_called_off
great work
woops, put that on the wrong post — supposed to be on the comments for the pig post, sorry
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