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Most studies on post-harvest technology have so far concentrated on grains and other durable products, which are stored dry and a substantial technology has been developed to deal with these problems. Much less work has been undertaken on the perishable food crops, yet they are of great importance in many parts of the humid and sub-humid tropics and contribute the staple carbohydrate portion of the diets of some 500-700 million people in the developing countries.
The socio-cultural background to the societies whose material sustenance depends primarily on these staples is also discussed, with emphasis on their ecocentric rather than technocentric philosophies. It is considered that in many cases the traditional technologies, developed in the distant past within subsistence agricultural societies, may be especially appropriate, as is considered further in Chapters 3 and 4. During the last decade or so, much effort has been devoted by bilateral and multilateral aid agencies to investigations and action programmes in the post-harvest sector using such terminologies as "rural technology", "grass roots technology", "small-scale technology", "intermediate technology", or "appropriate technology", but the greater part of the conceptual philosophy of such work has been derived primarily from the conventional scientific approaches of the developed world and has neglected the very considerable corpus of knowledge that has been accumulated in traditional societies, relating to their crops, over the past centuries or millennia.
In the case of the tropical perishable staple foods, which have no close analogues in temperate zone agriculture, this neglect of the traditional wisdom is especially unfortunate, as the underlying philosophies of the cultures in which they are extensively grown are not, to use the terminology of Swift (1979), so much pre-Galilean as non-Galilean, and are extremely alien to those of Europe, within which scientific thinking developed (Coursey, 1976; 1978a) as is discussed further in Chapter 4. The main theme of this document is that this store of traditional knowledge, especially of the post-harvest technology of these perishable staples, has remained largely untapped, but possibilities nevertheless exist for the interaction of modern scientific concepts with these traditional systems. The subject has already been discussed briefly by one of the present authors (Coursey, 1981a; 1982), while recently there has been a development of interest (Howes and Chambers, 1979; Swift, 1979) in giving consideration to the value of the indigenous technical knowledge in various fields.
This document sets out to review what is known, or at least what has been recorded (which, regrettably, is much less) of the post-harvest technology of the perishable, non-grain staple foods of the tropical world, as understood within the cultures which are primarily dependent on them. These are predominantly the indigenous cultures of the humid, low-altitude tropics, to which the majority of the vegetatively propagated food crops belong and within which they are often at an ecological advantage compared with grains (see Chapter 2). Attention is also given to the specific role of women in the post-harvest technology of the perishable staples but little firm data is available on this subject.
The document is fully referenced, as far as possible, from material that itself provides good sources of further reference material.