Food loss and waste still claim between 30 and 50 percent of global food production before it ever reaches a plate, according to Professor Lembe Magwaza, who holds the South Africa-Germany Bilateral Research Chair in Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems at the University of Mpumalanga. Speaking around the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste on 29 September, she set out why the losses run so high and what might finally bring them down.
Magwaza draws a distinction that shapes the whole debate. Food loss happens upstream, during production, harvest, handling, storage and transport, before goods ever reach a shop. Food waste happens downstream, at retail, in restaurants and in homes. For staple grains such as maize, wheat and millet, losses can reach 30 percent. For perishable fruit and vegetables grown by smallholders, the figure can climb to 50 percent in the worst cases, largely because produce spoils before it can be sold.
Two agricultures, two sets of risks
South Africa illustrates the gap starkly. The country runs what agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo has called two agricultures: a well-resourced commercial sector with reliable cold chains, and a much larger smallholder sector, dominated by black farmers, that often lacks electricity, storage and financing. Spoilage in that second sector is frequently driven by pathogens that produce mycotoxins, a food-safety risk as well as an economic one.
Consumers add to the pressure in less visible ways. Bulk buying leaves households discarding food they never got around to eating, while demand for uniform size, colour and shape pushes cosmetically imperfect but perfectly edible produce out of the retail chain altogether. Magwaza argues that fixing the problem therefore means working on both ends of the chain at once, from the field to the fridge.
Cold rooms before the market, not after
Her proposed fixes start cheap. Evaporative and charcoal-based cooling can extend shelf life for farmers who have no access to electricity, buying crucial hours before produce has to move. Shared, well-managed cold rooms, run as aggregation services rather than owned by a single farm, could let groups of smallholders store different crops at the temperatures each needs without the capital cost of building their own facility. Agro-processing offers another route, turning surplus or cosmetically rejected fruit and vegetables into shelf-stable products rather than letting them rot.
Preharvest management matters as much as anything that happens afterwards, Magwaza says, since poor quality at the point of harvest is difficult or impossible to correct later. She wants evidence-based policy paired with practical training for smallholders, delivered in the communities most exposed to the losses.
Her five-year goal names specific places: Nkomazi, Bushbuckridge, Bergville, Msinga and Ngcobo, areas she hopes to help shift from subsistence farming toward enterprises that can supply markets reliably throughout the year. The broader aim is a food system that depends less on the current retail model and leans more on local production and local nutrition.
The scale of the challenge is not unique to South Africa. Agencies including the Food and Agriculture Organization have long estimated that roughly a third of food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted, a figure consistent with the range Magwaza cites. What her work adds is a closer look at why the smallholder end of that equation loses so much more, and a set of fixes pitched at the scale those farmers can actually afford.
