Institutional arrangements, social relations, and food loss and waste in Tanzania’s export avocado value chain

Food loss and waste (FLW) in low- and middle-income countries is often framed as a problem of technical inefficiency, poor infrastructure, or inadequate post-harvest handling. Such explanations, however, give insufficient attention to the institutional arrangements and social relations through which FLW is produced and unevenly distributed. This study examines how governance arrangements, power asymmetries, and risk-allocation practices shape FLW in Tanzania’s export avocado value chain. It draws on multi-sited qualitative research conducted across the Northern and Southern Highlands of Tanzania between 2018 and 2022, supplemented by follow-up interviews in 2024. A total of 114 in-depth interviews were conducted with farmers, exporters, farmer-group representatives, field officers, packhouse actors, and government stakeholders, together with 15 days of go-along participant observation during harvesting, grading, sorting, and packhouse processing. The findings identify four modes of selling relations: contracted out-grower arrangements, direct selling through non-contracted farmer groups, mediated selling through cooperatives and associations, and spot buying or side-selling. Across these arrangements, FLW resulted not only from the material perishability of avocados or failure to meet quality standards, but also from unequal control over harvesting decisions, opaque pricing and grading systems, contract sanctions, selective buying practices, delayed harvesting, and inequitable rejection-sharing mechanisms, and farmers’ own risk-avoidance strategies. The study shows that exporters and buyers often reduced their exposure to market and quality risks by shifting costs and uncertainty onto farmers. Farmers responded through strategies such as side-selling and increasing farmgate weight by harvesting immature fruit or non-exportable avocado varieties, which can generate further losses and waste. By demonstrating that FLW is a material outcome of how power, value, risk, and responsibility are organised within export-oriented horticultural chains, the paper contributes to critical FLW scholarship and calls for interventions that go beyond technical fixes to address transparent pricing and grading, farmer representation, fairer contractual arrangements, strengthened producer organisations and more equitable risk-sharing arrangements across the value chain.