Australian businesses helping to end global food losses

One of Australia’s most innovative IT businesses is taking steps to assist the agricultural sector to end global food losses through its new product “AgriTrace”. In 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) commissioned a report by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology; Global Food Losses and Food Waste: Extent, Causes and Prevention, which found that around one third of all food produced for human consumption is lost.

A range of other studies completed around the world have come to similar conclusions with findings of anywhere between 20% and 75% of crops produced being lost as a result of financial, managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climactic conditions, lack of suitable infrastructure, and inappropriate marketing systems.

Food loss is described by the FAO as ‘the decrease in quantity or quality of food’. These are the agricultural or fisheries products intended for human consumption that are ultimately not eaten by people and includes products that have incurred a reduction in quality reflected in their nutritional value, economic value, or food safety. At 1.3 billion tons every year (enough to feed the world’s 870 million hungry people four times over) this is an incredible amount of food.

Since 2013, Connexxion, an IT solutions company based in Canberra, Australia, has been meeting with agricultural and government entities to discuss how they can assist countries in the pacific and around the world to limit food losses by implementing innovative and cost effective commodity management and tracking solutions. The key to these efforts, called AgriTrace, is a module of the Virtual Warehouse suite which uses a .Net web enabled interface that can be accessed from any standard web browser to provide visibility of the entire agricultural supply chain. AgriTrace offers primary producers and aggregators an unprecedented level of transparency into the entire lifecycle of their product from paddock to plate and is capable of increasing efficiency in contracts, pricing, records and commodity handling to assist growers to make more informed decisions and to attract a broader spread of buyers. It does this by giving growers access to a data repository of commodities information that can be used to drive change and improve the market sector.  

The real time log of primary producers’ planned harvest can then be trended to find improvements and increase productivity. AgriTrace brings buyers and sellers together in a secure environment.

You can find out more about the solution from their website www.cxxvirtualwarehouse.com or by contacting Mitchell Westra at Mitchell.Westra@connexxion.com.au and 0420 524 423.