1. Rationalizing the Need for More Efficient Supply Chain Practices in the Agricultural Sector
Over the last ten years, there has been a huge growth in imported food items into Pakistan, including cheese, fruits, canned food products, processed livestock, exotic vegetables and fruits, and many other agricultural products due to a performance gap — shortcomings in existing practices, particularly with respect to technological developments at global level.
The horticulture part is vulnerable to significant levels of off-farm damages. Most natural products such as vegetables etc., are profoundly short-lived, and if care isn't taken in their collection, preservation, storage and transport, they before long rot and cannot be utilized by humans. Assessments of post-harvest losses in Pakistan are tremendous and a few specialists put these as high as 40% of the total cultivated produce. These losses of the agribusiness products in Pakistan has been a significant obstruction to the improvement of the local horticulture esteem chain (USAID Workshop,, Karachi- List of Challenges, n.d.).
Intermediate storage facilities play a critical role in preserving the quality of post-harvest products. These not only decouple distribution from production but also ensure a buffer that helps level off demand and supply mismatches. An adequate buffer of commodity crops also stabilizes price volatility. While storage facilities can be constructed or provided at pre-defined locations, it makes more economic sense to integrate them into the broader context of the overall design of the agriculture supply chain network. This network may be region specific that allows for carefully identifying and incorporating into the design all possible cost elements and logistics constraints that impact profitability.
Temperature and relative humidity are said to be the two most important environmental factors influencing the quality and storage life of fresh produce. Safe storage and transient purposes are well served if the stipulated ambient conditions are maintained. In the absence of cold storage and related cold chain facilities, the farmers are forced to sell their produce immediately after harvest which results in glut situations and low price realization. Cold chain infrastructure for fruits and vegetables can substantially improve storage quality and reduce wastage.
Currently, no such technology is in use especially with respect to the overall supply chain network design. In fact, supply chain analytics and optimization software hardly find their presence in most higher education institutions in the country. Further, while solar technology has been incentivized locally in recent years, its more regulated design in food storage applications is yet to be tested. The initial proposition of the authors relies heavily on its evidence in several Asian and African countries, more specifically like India and Kenya. But Pakistan has the base infrastructure for indigenously manufacturing most of the design components of solar-powered systems envisaged in this chapter.
In developing the entire proposed framework, it will be imperative to restrict the mathematical model to just a limited combination of farms, markets, storage sites, and products for any specific region. This will be unavoidable since comprehensive data will not be available without detailed site visits targeting growers, transporters, and customers. Also, large scale models require software that are only available commercially. However, the beauty of mathematical modeling is its ability to expand in scope without involving additional modeling logic. Once a scaled-down version has been validated, it becomes relatively easy to incorporate many other routes, costs and constraints into the model.