A simple, inexpensive Israeli solution for storing staples is
helping Africans, South Americans and Asians survive food shortages.
When the Biblical Joseph predicted that Egypt would suffer a major
famine thousands of years ago, he told the Pharaoh to store grain for
seven years. His foresight kept the people in the region from
starvation. Prof. Shlomo Navarro, an Israeli environmental food
specialist, is taking the same approach today.
Intuitively,
Navarro suspects that the Biblical Joseph kept the grain underground,
which today would be a costly and unwieldy solution. Since the Bible
provides few details on how Joseph stored the grain, Navarro can only
imagine he applied the same basic scientific principles: hermetically
seal the grain so oxygen, water, sunlight and pests can’t get in or out.
Once the grain is inside this cocoon –– along with the insects and
insect eggs naturally found in it –– if air can’t enter or leave, the
carbon dioxide level will eventually rise and kill off the bugs. Sounds
simple, but in practice this is harder to accomplish than one might
think.
Navarro’s modern-day product, now owned and sold by the American
company GrainPro as GrainPro Cocoon, is helping Africans, South
Americans and Asians survive famines and save grain in a cost-effective
and simple way.
The core technology is in the cocoon material, which is designed for
open desert conditions, like in Africa and South America where storage
facilities are poor or unavailable. The cocoons can be used multiple
times for many years under harsh climatic conditions.
Wrapped in a Cocoon
The GrainPro Cocoon is essentially a large plastic bag, durable
against tears and damage from sunlight. The unit is hermetically sealed
so nothing can get in or out.
“Why don’t farmers buy plastic bags and use them? To store grain
properly, you need special features,” Navarro explains. “Not all plastic
bags have the same flexibility or durability under the sun. You need
something that is elastic and doesn’t tear easily. You need something
that gives you a high level of probability that oxygen won’t enter the
bag, or cocoon. These are important points.”
The idea came to Navarro when he was working as an agricultural
researcher. “I thought the existing solutions, all the chemicals, are
really harmful to the environment and to people. I thought we had to
develop alternative, environmentally friendly solutions, like biological
methods.”
This is what brought him to think of the ancient Joseph.
“If you keep the commodity under hermetic conditions, the result is you
get a healthy product without the damage that might be caused by the
organisms,” he says.
Navarro estimates that millions of units of this very practical,
inexpensive and effective grain storage technique have been sold since
going commercial in the late 1990s. Developed through the US-Israel
Science and Technology Foundation back in the 1980s, the cocoon was
previously marketed by a kibbutz specializing in plastics.
Navarro, a serial entrepreneur, got his start as a principal
scientist in the Department of Food Science of the Volcani Center-Israel
Agricultural Research Organization in Beit Dagan.
His innovations for safe storage of pulses, grains, seeds, dried
fruits and other stable bulk products were all, like the GrainPro
Cocoon, developed to be user-friendly in order to protect food without
toxic pesticides. Today he is a worldwide authority on durable
commodities storage with a strong emphasis on insect control in a safe
environmental way.
Recently, 4.3 million metric tons of rice were
put into storage in a new facility in Colombo, Sri Lanka using the
GrainPro Cocoon. In the past, because of poor storage capabilities, some
15 to 20 percent of that amount of rice would be lost.
GrainPro is also on display at a demonstration site in Rwanda, where
Africans from far and wide come to see how this product can help them
save grain, money, the environment and even people’s lives.
http://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-invention-models-joseph/