A review of post-harvest milk losses in Tanzania’s milk sector: lessons from production to consumption
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Date
2023
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tanzania Journal of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Tanzania has engaged in various policies, strategies and programmes in order to increase
production, processing and marketing infrastructure for milk and milk products and minimise
animal product losses. However, not much is known in relation to post-harvest milk losses. Therefore,
the review paper aims to establish from empirical literature the extent of Tanzania’s post-harvest
milk losses and the causes in relation to efforts made by the government to minimise the same. To
achieve the above, the authors used various databases to locate documents reporting on Tanzania’s
post-harvest milk losses whereby 1605 documents were identified and screened remaining with 82
that were deemed relevant. Thereafter, an assessment of the 82 documents led to only 12 being
included in the critical review, with ten being dropped due to either being similar or using the same
data. Therefore, in the end, only two documents are captured in this paper. Generally, the review
shows that there is insufficient empirical information on Tanzania’s post-harvest milk losses with
the most recent study having been conducted almost 19 years ago. In addition, the study’s scope
was quite limited, covering a sample of 66 respondents and a narrow geographical coverage of
only three regions (i.e. Coast, Dar es Salaam and Morogoro). Furthermore, the study used the
rapid appraisal approach. Therefore, there is a need for disaggregated information on Tanzania’s
extent of post-harvest milk losses at various nodes of the milk value chain so as to inform policy
makers and other stakeholders interested in curbing the same.
Keywords: Milk losses, milk supply chain, post-harvest losses.
Description
Research article
Keywords
Post-harvest milk losses, Production, Tanzania’s milk sector