ACHACHA: Una FRUTA nativa de Bolivia cuyo consumo global se impulsó desde Australia - ACHACHA: A native Bolivian FRUIT which global consumption was promoted from Australia

Achacha (Foto: http://www.vivasantacruz.com)

Garcinia humilis, conocido comúnmente como achachairú o achacha es un árbol perteneciente a la familia Clusiaceae, de 6-7 m de altura que crece únicamente en la región de las llanuras aluviales de Bolivia y cuyo fruto es una baya comestible. Está emparentado con el mangostán (G. mangostana) y el madroño (G. madruno). Se cultiva tradicionalmente en Bolivia, pero recientemente se ha plantado en escala comercial en Australia. La fruta obtuvo el tercer lugar en los Premios a la Innovación Fruit Logística 2012, celebrada en Berlín.

El fruto de la achacha tiene un color dorado intenso que llega al anaranjado rojizo brillante cuando está maduro. Tiene forma oval y llega a tener, hasta 6 cm de largo por 4 cm de diámetro. Suele tener una semilla grande de color café, en un fruto más grande pueden hallarse dos semillas. Como cultivo de fruta ecológica, que no ha atravesado cientos de generaciones de cría selectiva, cada fruto tiene sus propias características, frecuentemente con algunas pequeñas irregularidades y marcas en su piel, que añaden interés a su apariencia, pero no afectan a su calidad. Pulpa blanca comestible. El sabor es descrito tanto amargo como dulce. La cáscara es dura y amarga y se puede dividir con un cuchillo o con los dientes de la parte comestible de la fruta adherida a la semilla.
El Departamento de Agricultura, Pesca y Silvicultura de Queensland determinó que el fruto se conserva bien durante 4-6 semanas en un rango de 15 a 20ºC y alta humedad relativa. La cosecha es en el verano (diciembre a marzo en el hemisferio sur).

Source: wikipedia.org

Cámara de bajo costo para mirar el interior de las FRUTAS - Inexpensive camera to look inside the FRUIT

Siempre es difícil seleccionar una fruta en el supermercado, por fuera se ve en perfecto estado, pero quizás por dentro ya esté madurando. Por ello la Universidad de Washington (UW) junto a Microsoft Research, desarrollaron una cámara que permite ver el interior del producto con mayor detalle. Se trata de HyperCam, una cámara hiperespectral de bajo costo que utiliza tanto la luz visible como la del infrarrojo cercano para ‘”ver” bajo las superficies y capturar los detalles que no se ven.

Este tipo de cámara se utiliza normalmente en aplicaciones industriales y puede costar entre varios miles a decenas de miles de dólares, informa la Universidad de Washington. En un documento presentado en la conferencia UbiComp 2015, el equipo detalló que la solución hardware cuesta unos USD 800, o potencialmente tan poco como USD 50 si se fabrica sólo lo esencial y se añade a una cámara de teléfono móvil. Los investigadores también desarrollaron un software inteligente que encuentra fácilmente las diferencias “ocultas” entre lo que la cámara hiperespectral captura y lo que se puede ver a simple vista.

Como parte de una investigación preliminar de la utilidad de HyperCam como herramienta biométrica, en una prueba con 25 usuarios el sistema fue capaz de diferenciar entre las imágenes de las manos de los usuarios con 99% de exactitud. En otra prueba, el equipo también tomó imágenes hiperespectrales de 10 frutas, entre ellas frutillas (fresas), mangos y paltas (aguacates) en el transcurso de una semana. Las imágenes de HyperCam predijeron la madurez relativa de las frutas con 94% de precisión, en comparación con el 62% de una cámara típica.

“Con este tipo de cámara se puede ir a la tienda de comestibles y saber qué fruta escoger mirando bajo de la piel y ver si hay algo mal en el interior. Es como tener una aplicación de seguridad de los alimentos en el bolsillo”, manifestó Shwetak Patel, profesor de informática e ingeniería electrónica de la Washington Research Foundation en UW.

En la actualidad, las imágenes hiperespectrales se utilizan para todo, desde imágenes satelitales y monitoreo de energía hasta inspecciones de infraestructura y de seguridad alimentaria, pero el alto costo de la tecnología ha limitado su uso para fines industriales o comerciales. Ante esto, el equipo de la Universidad de Washington y Microsoft Research quería ver si podía hacer una cámara hiperespectral relativamente simple y asequible para el uso del consumidor.

Según lo informado, el sistema aún debe superar algunos desafíos. Por ejemplo, la cámara no funciona particularmente bien en luz brillante y el equipo está buscando la forma de hacerla más pequeña para incluirla en un teléfono móvil.
Fuente: http://www.portalfruticola.com

New long shelf life, high-yielding CANTALOUPE variety - Nueva variedad de MELÓN de larga vida poscosecha y alto rendimiento

“The melon is highly valued for its holding ability in the field, allowing more flexibility when it comes to harvest, long-distance transportation and prolonged freshness on the retailer’s shelf, in the professional chef’s kitchen and on the consumer’s counter. Infinite Gold LSL (Long Shelf Life) is the next big thing in cantaloupes, where strong performance meets great fruit quality,” stated Gattis Guffey, Senior Melon Product Development Manager at Sakata. “Infinite Gold delivers durability, yield and flavor, which means growers and suppliers no longer have to sacrifice one for the other.”

The long shelf life characteristics of Infinite Gold help to provide growers with some flexibility in harvest timing based on weather, market prices or the availability of labor. They can be harvested in as little as two to three trips. Fewer passes save money on fertilizer, use less water and require fewer people and machines, also reducing the risk of contamination and minimizing food safety hazards. Typically, developing an LSL melon had to come at the cost of overall flavor, but not anymore. Infinite Gold offers the rich flavor and deep coloring that consumers love, creating the perfect balance between melony, musky, sweet and floral. In fact, the flavor of Infinite Gold has ranked higher than the leading competition in flavor, texture, aroma and overall quality in two separate third party research studies.
“What we have done is develop a premium melon that provides benefits at all levels of the supply chain,” said Guffey. “Not only do growers experience the benefits, but packers, shippers, foodservice distributors, processors, retailers and consumers all reap the rewards."
Source: http://www.freshplaza.com

Combating FRESH AGRIFOOD waste in sub-Saharan Africa - Combatiendo el desperdicio de AGROALIMENTOS FRESCOS en África subsahariana

"Though the mangos have come directly from the farms where they were grown, many of them are bruised. The damage is almost all a result of how the fruit was transported: packed as tightly as possible into thin bags and crammed into trucks that offer no padding as they race over Tanzania's bumpy rural roads"

Photo: africaunchained.blogspot.com

At the bustling Kilombero wholesale produce market in the town of Arusha, Tanzania, traders sort hundreds of pounds of mangos that have just been unloaded from trucks. Traders separate the mangos they'll have to discard or, if they're lucky, sell at a discount to buyers who may be able to turn them into juice. A sprawling, three-foot-high mound of rejected mangos grows by the minute. Brown and black spots speckle the fruits' green skin, orange flesh oozing out through cracks. 

Like much of sub-Saharan Africa, Tanzania produces all kinds of food for local consumption as well as export. Yet here, in the part of the world that can arguably least afford to waste food, a good portion of these crops are lost. Much of the loss happens before the food can be eaten, during the so-called "post-harvest" phase between harvest and the point of sale or consumption. The problem is that the equipment and methods that many small-scale farmers use to process and store their crops are inadequate, so months after the harvest, tons of corn might be infested with insects or contaminated with toxic mold. More perishable crops like fruits and vegetables may become inedible in a matter of days. Long a neglected aspect of the agricultural system in developing countries, this waste stream of food is starting to attract attention from global agriculture organizations and financial institutions, offering hope that the losses can be reduced, and with them rates of rural hunger and malnutrition. 

Food waste in Africa and other developing nations is an entirely different problem than it is in developed regions. In developing regions, often the biggest chunk of food loss — more than 40 percent — occurs during the post-harvest phase, according to a 2011 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report. But in developed regions, the biggest chunk — again more than 40 percent — occurs at the retail and consumer levels. 

Across sub-Saharan Africa, more than a third of fruits, vegetables, roots, and tubers are lost by the time they are processed or packaged, according to the FAO report, the most recent comprehensive estimate available. More precise estimates vary from year to year and from country to country. In Kenya, pests destroy up to 30 percent of all maize harvested — a total loss of about 162 million tons, according to the government-run Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Ghana, meanwhile, loses up to 50 % of its main crops of vegetables, fruits, cereals, roots, and tubers, said Joe Oteng-Adjei, the country's Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, according to the news service GhanaWeb. 

The food waste problem has been neglected for so long that there's no long-term data to show whether these figures have changed over time. In fact, the FAO and other organizations have acknowledged that even existing estimates are not particularly reliable, because the measurement methods are haphazard at best. What's clear is that food in sub-Saharan Africa is being wasted on a large scale, and any progress in reducing that waste should benefit the region — and even the global food supply — significantly. A World Bank report, also issued in 2011, stated that even a 1 percent reduction in post-harvest losses could lead to annual economic gains of $40 million, much of it going directly to farmers. 

The waste is an economic loss, but it is also a loss of precious nutrition and calories. The World Bank report estimated that the value of annual losses, $4 billion, exceeds the total value of food aid sent to sub-Saharan Africa in the decade up to 2008. Even as international efforts to reduce hunger in the region have increased, most of the dollars spent have focused on boosting crop yields, despite the lack of means for storing extra crops. "More production is not going to be able to fill that gap that we're worried about to feed the world in the future. What we have to do is reduce losses," said Lisa Kitinoja, founder of the Oregon-based, nonprofit Postharvest Education Foundation. 

That is slowly starting to happen. The release of the two 2011 reports by international institutions as influential as the World Bank and FAO served as an indication of the growing interest in solving this problem — and also as a rallying cry that motivated other organizations to get involved. Agriculture research organizations across Africa, including several members of the respected global research consortium CGIAR, have started focusing on ways to reduce crop losses. The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation have funded initiatives to study and reduce food waste in developing countries, as have organizations in Europe and elsewhere. 

Just outside Arusha, a women's group is learning to make and can a variety of jams that they can sell in nearby markets: mango and guava, but also more experimental flavors like banana-ginger and even an onion marmalade. It's a sharp learning curve for them. To be able to sell commercially, they have to learn about health and sanitation (for a food-safety certification) in addition to perfecting their jam recipes. On a recent Saturday afternoon, a batch of the banana-ginger jam stewed on a freestanding gas burner in a nondescript church-owned building. The women boiled and sterilized jars as black clouds of bees swarmed the room. Lesson learned: close the windows before making banana jam. 

Ultimately, the women hope to preserve more of their crops to eat throughout the year, and earn a bit of income in the process. The training they received from a local post-harvest consultant is just the kind of thing a growing number of organizations working with rural communities to reduce food waste intends to do. The Postharvest Education Foundation, for example, works with farmers and other agricultural workers around the world to identify projects that can help them make a better living by preserving more of their crops. 

Because people are accustomed to losing so much of their harvest, they often need some kind of inspiration, or motivation, before they even consider trying to reduce waste. For example, the group making jam had seen that another group of women making jam across town was able to sell to the local upscale supermarket. The potential for such a lucrative market made them eager to try it for themselves. "Farmers harvest and they don't store. They want to market and sell and get cash straight away," said Ngoni Nenguwo, post-harvest specialist at the Arusha office of the World Vegetable Center, or AVRDC, an international agricultural-research nonprofit that trained the jam-making women. "It just never seemed an option to preserve better. Waste is just a part of agriculture."  

Faraji Msechu, who farms a small plot a few hours to the south of Arusha, said he never thought about trying to reduce the amount of corn he lost to poor storage. That changed when an organization reached out to him to participate in research on storage gear that could improve upon the polypropylene bags he and most other farmers stored their corn in. "I never had that thinking. I just used the polypropylene bags to store maize, and it was business as usual," he said. As important as the need to transform old habits is the need to improve the storage and processing equipment available in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a quickly-growing array of tools, from forced-air cooling rooms to solar dryers, that can help farmers and processors preserve their harvest in the absence of the grain elevators, refrigerators, and freezers that developed countries rely on so heavily. 

AVRDC has a department devoted to post-harvest research and operates a training center in Arusha to demonstrate equipment for local farmers. One promising example on offer is plastic crates for transportation. AVRDC research has shown that switching from wood-slat to plastic crates can reduce the percentage of tomatoes lost during transport from 53 to 22. Because the plastic crates are smoother and have more even walls, the tomatoes inside don't get scratched, squeezed, or smashed as easily as they do in the wooden ones. Even so, the crates are a tough sell. They are much more expensive than the wooden crates, so they must be shipped back to the farmer for reuse, whereas the wooden crates are used once then broken down for, say, firewood at the end of the journey. 

Compatible Technology International, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, has designed and tested several products to reduce crop losses in various African countries in recent years. The organization recently introduced equipment for processing millet in Senegal that it says captures more than 90 percent of the grain — up from roughly half using traditional methods — while also nearly eliminating contaminants like dirt and debris. But equipment alone isn't the solution, said executive director Alexandra Spieldoch. Also essential is leadership and financial training to help farmers adopt the equipment —something the organization tries to achieve through partnerships with local groups and government agencies. 

Other researchers in Tanzania, Kenya, and a few other countries are studying the potential of plant materials to serve as pesticides during crop storage. If they prove successful, the plant materials may save farmers money while also eliminating the need for potentially harmful synthetic chemicals. 
Efforts like these are all so new that it remains unclear which are likely to be the most effective or easily adopted. What is clear is that in countries like Tanzania, where malnutrition and hunger are as persistent as ever, every ounce of wasted food could have provided beneficial calories for someone. 

In February, during a training course in Arusha for agriculture workers learning to teach farmers better crop storage and processing methods, Kitinoja focused part of a morning on emerging opportunities for post-harvest work. There is a lot of potential throughout sub-Saharan Africa right now, not only for reducing the amount of food that gets wasted, but also for people to make careers out of doing so, she said. "I've been working on this for 30 years," she said. "Three years ago, I couldn't have made this presentation. No one was talking about postharvest." 

Source:Rachel Cernansky (http://news.mongabay.com)

Cuidados de la GUAYABA de Taiwan después de cosecharla - Posthaverst handling of the Taiwanese GUAVA

La guayaba de Taiwán (Psidium guajava L.) es un cultivo que gradualmente se expande en el sector agrícola hondureño, destinando su cosecha al mercado nacional y regional. Como la mayoría de las frutas tropicales, la guayaba taiwanesa de pulpa blanca, es un producto altamente perecedero cuando se conserva en condiciones inadecuadas de temperatura, humedad relativa y empaque.

Tomando en consideración que por algunas deficiencias en el manejo poscosecha de esta fruta se están ocasionando pérdidas a nivel de productores y supermercados, el Departamento de Poscosecha de la Fundación Hondureña para la Investigación Agrícola (FHIA) realizó un estudio para evaluar el comportamiento poscosecha de esta fruta y algunas características de calidad de la misma.

En este estudio se evaluaron los factores que a continuación se indican: A) Tiempo de almacenamiento con dos niveles (0 -25 días); B) Temperatura de almacenamiento con dos niveles: temperatura ambiente (32.0 °C con 85% de humedad relativa ) y refrigeración (10.0 °C con 85–90% de humedad relativa ); y C) Dos tipos de empaques: caja de cartón open top en frío y caja de cartón open top con frutas dentro de bolsa perforada con agujeros de 3.0 mm con 4 agujeros por pulgada cuadrada. Se analizó la tasa de respiración, calidad externa, firmeza, los sólidos solubles (°Brix), pH y acidez titulable (% ácido cítrico) de las frutas.

Los resultados muestran que la guayaba empacada en caja open top conservada en refrigeración, se mantiene en condiciones muy buenas durante un periodo de almacenamiento de 25 días más 4 días de vida de anaquel. Sin embargo, la fruta que se mantiene en caja y con bolsa perforada se mantiene bien solo durante 9 días de almacenamiento, por lo que debe ser consumida de inmediato al concluir este periodo.

Fuente: http://www.latribuna.hn