That figure, he said, represents 18 per cent of the country’s annual maize production.

Dr Tran announced this at the launch of APHLIS+, an advanced form of APHLIS in Accra.

Most of the losses were recorded in the Northern Region where a total of 20,411 tonnes of maize were lost, followed by the Upper East Region, which also recorded over 13,000 tonnes of losses.

The Volta, Ashanti, Eastern and Western regions recorded losses of 8,983, 3,292, 2,660, and 2,360 tonnes respectively. The Greater Accra and Upper West regions recorded losses of 2,237 and 778 respectively, with the Brong Ahafo and Central Regions recording the least losses of 734 and 639 respectively.

Poor storage

Dr Tran explained that most of the maize was lost because the farmers failed to dry them thoroughly before storage which caused insects to attack the maize. He, therefore, advised the government to promote good agricultural practices and also urged the farmers to adopt the best practices in order to reduce post-harvest losses.

Dr Tran said the network provided estimates of post-harvest losses which became an important data for policy makers, food security staff making cereal supply estimates and for agricultural practitioners proposing or actually managing interventions to reduce post-harvest losses.

He said it helped the government and other stakeholders by pinpointing to them where the problem was so they could come out with an intervention.

APHLIS+ launch

The APHLIS+ is a five-year project which is aimed at generating figures for the Post-Harvest Losses (PHLs) of cereal crops and other crops in a transparent manner that could also facilitate the updating of PHL estimates as new data becomes available.

The project is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with US$ 4 million.

Since the 1970s, efforts have been made to assess grain losses suffered by African farmers and most of it had focused on grain in storage. Thus, little data had been generated on harvesting, drying, threshing/winnowing or transport losses.