Dry Chain Centers at five locations in tropical Asia, Africa and Central America, we will empower small farmers and incentivize supply chain actors to adopt these technologies that improve food security and health.

 Heated-air drying with mobile equipment is feasible, but has relatively low efficiency in hot, humid conditions.

We will therefore facilitate the introduction of a powerful desiccant (Drying Beads) that can be used to dry commodities and then be activated for reuse by heating (with greater energy efficiency than heated-air systems). The desiccant is only required for a short period by a given user, enabling its repeated and continual reuse through community-based Dry Chain Centers that we will establish.

We will incentivize traders and end users higher up the value chain to provide these resources to farmers, maintain the integrity of the containers through distribution and then recycle them back for reuse.

We will implement the dry chain simply by replacing porous storage containers with impermeable ones in cases where sun or air drying is sufficient. The Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bags project has demonstrated that this is feasible on a large scale. However, that approach requires drying commodities to an appropriate MC to be successful.