Flowers. Groundnuts (peanuts). Wheat. And paddy (rice): These were the focus of a 10-day student excursion to India over the 2014 winter break. Business administration professor Udatta Palekar organized the trip with 15 undergraduate business students majoring in supply chain management.
This was Palekar’s third such trip to India, his nation of origin. On the trip, the students meet and tour the facilities of small-scale farmers, food distributors, market vendors, restaurant managers, and storage facility operators.
The ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss at the U. of I. supports this annual trip as part of its effort to broaden awareness of costly inefficiencies in agricultural supply chains. In a country like India, where population growth threatens to overwhelm the food supply, such losses can spell the difference between subsistence and starvation.
Early in the trip, the students saw a Hindu temple in Chennai. They spoke to farmers at the Marketplace Literacy Community Trust, a nongovernmental organization founded in 2003 by U. of I. business administration professor Madhubalan Viswanathan. This program offers marketing and finance education to farmers with small landholdings.
The students visited the Koyambedu Market, one of the largest wholesale markets in Asia. They also traveled by bus to smaller villages to see how rice is grown, stored and transported. On one stop, they watched women planting paddy in a rice field.
“We were actually able to go right out in the field with the women hand-planting the rice paddies,” said Casey Dollinger, 20, a senior in accounting and supply chain management from Joliet, Illinois.
“It was a really cool experience to see the process behind what ends up conveniently packed in a bag at the supermarket,” said Samer Ijaz, 22, a native of Akron, Ohio, who has since graduated with a degree in supply chain management and marketing.
These travels gave students a first look at significant post-harvest losses. They saw rice paddy left in fields after harvest, rice lost to spillage from containers or burlap bags with holes in them, trucks with unsecured beds allowing the rice to spill out in transit, rice ruined by rain or broken underfoot as it dried in the open air.
“The first thing I noticed was the lack of proper storage,” said Danny Benz, 21, a senior in supply chain management and marketing from Orland Park, Illinois. Some places stored their rice in bags, with no other protection from pests and rain. Some used tarps or put the rice in bags beneath a roof overhang, he said.
“The best storage was in an actual facility where they could control the temperature and they had pest control,” he said.
Economic hardships often hinder farmers’ efforts to address post-harvest losses, Benz said.
“They might not have the extra money needed to store the rice effectively until they can sell it to a distributor,” he said.
The informal nature of many of the business transactions she witnessed simultaneously impressed and dismayed Dollinger.
“A lot of the restaurants and hotels would come to the markets at three in the morning to purchase their goods for that day,” she said. “Nothing was written down, like we have in stores in the U.S. where you have a database of how much is sold and when you have to restock. In India, the sellers would just have it all in their minds.
They knew who their loyal customers were and how much they needed. And they would say that they try their best not to have waste.”
Professor Palekar thinks the India trip gives students a more realistic view of what goes on in much of the world outside the U.S.
“Supply chain students in the U.S. tend to study the relationships between large-scale firms and institutions,” he said. “In countries like India and many others, this is not the dominant makeup of food systems. When the students understand what factors are involved in producing food and why people make the decisions they do, their ability to think critically about problems and how to go about solving them is greatly enhanced.”
The students agree.
Before the trip, studying the issue of post-harvest loss left Janae Moore, a 19-year-old junior in agricultural and biological engineering, wondering how the issue was “relevant to me,” she wrote in a blog post after the trip. Moore is from Chicago.
“Once on the trip, that all changed. Two days in Chennai, three mills, four fields and nine interviews later, post-harvest loss really hit home,” she wrote. “Now I understood why my formal education is relevant to the real world.”