A review of post-harvest milk losses in Tanzania’s milk sector: Lessons from production to consumption

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.