pest attacks, etc. Appropriate technical and managerial solutions
to these losses will need to reflect such variations.
Using APHLIS data, weighted average losses for East and
Southern Africa, according to reported figures, are estimated
to range from 10–20 percent, with estimates varying between
regions within countries (Figure 2.11). There have often been
demands for simplified loss figures; this has led to the PHL of
maize for a country or region being reduced to a single figure
representative of many years. However, such an approach is
likely to be misleading because PHL may be due to a variety
of factors, the importance of which varies from commodity
to commodity, from season to season, and according to the
enormous variety of circumstances under which commodities
are grown, harvested, stored, processed, and marketed.
It is therefore important to not only work with figures that
are good estimates at the time and in the situation in which
they are taken but to also be aware that in other situations,
the figures will differ. This necessitates regular recalculation
of loss estimates with the best figures available.
Recent efforts to estimate accumulative weight loses
in Ghana show similar figures as in the case of cereals in
Eastern and Western Africa (Table 2.6). The losses vary by
grain crop and season, with the largest estimates found for
maize in the main season and the smallest for sorghum in
minor season.
The above estimates of grain losses appear to be well below
the 40–50 percent loss estimate frequently cited by
development practitioners, yet they are still too high to
ignore.4 In Eastern and Southern Africa, which account for
about 40 percent of SSA’s estimated grain supplies, PHL are
estimated at US$1.6 billion a year (Table 2.7). This is assuming
weighted average loses of 13.5 percent (taking APHLIS
data as reference) of an estimated value of production of
approximately US$11 billion (based on the FAO statistics).
Extrapolating these figures to Central and Western Africa to
estimate the value of total PHL in SSA, the figure could reach
nearly US$4 billion a year, out of an estimated annual value of
grain production of US$27 billion in 2005–07.