DATE: 10/04/2020

BLOG BY: SUBHAM LADDHA  

There’s No Time, or Food, to Waste

How can the world nutritiously feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050, in a way that supports rural development and tackles climate change? This is one of the great challenges of the first half of this century. The World Resources Report Creating a Sustainable Food Future introduced a menu of solutions to address this challenge. Reducing food loss and waste are an important part of this strategy.

WRI’s 2019 report Reducing Food Loss and Waste: Setting a Global Action Agenda — published with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, and in partnership with United Nations Environment, Natural Resources Defense Council, Iowa State University, The University of Maryland's Ed Snider Center, The Consortium for Innovation in Post harvest Loss and Food Waste Reduction, Wageningen University and Research, and WRAP —  lays out a road map for how to realize the potential of reducing food loss and waste. The agenda first recommends that countries and companies follow a Target-Measure-Act approach: (a) adopt the Sustainable Development Goal target of halving food loss and waste, (b) measure their food loss and waste, and (c) take action where there are food loss and waste hot spots. Then, the agenda proposes a to-do list for each type of actor in the food supply chain. Finally, the agenda recommends 10 interventions that could scale the impact and pace of these interventions.

With our recent publication, Reducing Food Loss and Waste: 10 Interventions to Scale Impact, WRI and its partners dive deeper into these 10 scaling interventions:

1. Develop national strategies for reducing food loss and waste.
2. Create national public-private partnerships to tackle food loss and waste.
3. Launch a 10 × 20 × 30 initiative to get supply chains working on reducing food loss and waste.
4. Invigorate efforts to strengthen value chains to reduce smallholder losses.
5. Launch a “decade of storage solutions.”
6. Shift social norms to make wasting food socially unacceptable.
7. Go after the hotspots of food loss and waste-related greenhouse gas emissions.
8. Scale up financing for food loss and waste reduction technologies, enterprises, and programs.
9. Overcome the food loss and waste data deficit.
10. Advance the research agenda on food loss and waste.

Take 10 × 20 × 30, for instance. This private sector effort brings together 10 of the world's biggest food retailers and providers to each engage with 20 of their priority suppliers to aim to halve rates of food loss and waste by 2030. In this manner, food loss and waste reduction efforts move up the food supply chain from 10 to approximately 200 companies around the world. Such an initiative was announced in September. Founding retailers and providers are AEON, Ahold Delhaize, Carrefour, IKEA Food, Kroger, METRO AG, Pick n Pay, The Savola Group, Sodexo, Tesco and Walmart. Together, they include five of the 10 largest food retailers in the world, the world’s second-largest food service provider and leading food retailers in regions including southern Africa and the Middle East. Combined, participants operate in more than 80 countries.

Also in September, the Sustainable Rice Platform announced that it will work with rice growers to halve on-farm and near-farm rice losses by 2030. This is a big deal, since rice accounts for one out of every six food calories in the world, supports 144 million smallholders and is responsible for 16% of global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. That makes the announcement an important contribution toward the intervention focused on targeting hotspots of GHG emissions. More food sectors – including meat and dairy – with particularly high greenhouse gas emissions should redouble efforts to reduce their food loss and waste.

Food Waste and National Climate Commitments

Countries must also step up action. Between now and December 2020, nations of the world are supposed to be ratcheting up the ambition of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement on climate change. But only about a dozen countries have food loss and waste reduction targets and strategies in their NDCs. This is a huge missed opportunity. With about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions associated with food loss and waste, reductions can be an effective means of tackling climate change while also generating food security and economic benefits.

Other interventions are still nascent. The shifting social norms intervention is about using what the world has learned from previous efforts – for example, on drunk driving, littering and smoking — and from behavioral science to change attitudes and behaviors about food waste. Sixty years ago in the United States, for instance, people would throw litter out of car windows without a thought; nowadays, few would dare to do this. And yet, today people in developed countries throw away large amounts of food at home or when they dine out. How do we get more people to see wasting food as unacceptable behavior? The world needs to find messages, messengers and means to help shift such social norms. Getting religious communities engaged might be one way to tap into the ethical dimension of food waste and touch people’s hearts and minds.

It’s heartening to see some of the 10 recommended scaling interventions gaining momentum. But we have a long way to go. The global goal of halving food loss and waste is far from becoming a reality. So I urge governments, companies, civil society, financial institutions, and citizens to identify which of these you can help make a reality. Then get started.

                                     There’s no time, or food, to waste.

 World Enviromental Day (WED) is a day to remember that the Earth’s natural resources are limited, and to celebrate positive environmental actions that protect those resources. Food waste—which represents a third of all food produced globally—is a major area where the Earth’s resources could be used more responsibly. The Barilla      Centre  For Food And Nutirient      (BCFN) hopes to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2020 through the Milan Protocol.

According to Riccardo Valentini, a professor at the Università della Tuscia and BCFN Advisory Board member, “climate change…will contribute to increasing global food prices within a range of 3-84 percent by 2050, posing a serious threat to food production and security. Currently, over 800 million people are suffering from severe malnutrition worldwide and about 36 million die from lack of food. Successfully dealing with the issue of food access is therefore the great challenge for the coming years.”

“Food waste has a negative impact on the environment, on the economy, on food security and on nutrition,” affirms Ludovica Principato, a Ph.D candidate in Management at the La Sapienza University of Rome and a BCFN Foundation researcher.

BCFN advocates intervention throughout the entire food supply chain, from farmers to processing, and from distribution companies to the end user, in order to prevent waste. Before food is even purchased, losses occur due to improper handling, quality deterioration during transport, and inadequate infrastructure for cooling and storage. Fruit and vegetables losses during this stage have been estimated at 2-20 percent in developed countries, and at 24-40 percent in developing countries. High levels of waste result in higher prices for the final product, which could contribute to lower consumption of fruits and vegetables.

The retail level is also responsible for rejecting shipments of edible food that doesn’t meet visual or size standards. A 2011 report estimated 20 percent of initial food production is lost from products not meeting grading requirements in North America, Europe, Oceania, and Latin America. Fortunately, consumers are supermarkets around the world are changing these standards to accept ‘ugly’ fruits and vegetables and prevent food waste.

Household food waste is another major concern in the developed world. Consumers in high-income countries discard up to 30 percent of fruit and vegetable purchases and trim products up to 33 percent by weight during household preparation. Furthermore, waste from food packaging is unlikely to be recycled at the household level, having been the least affected category by the four-fold increase in recycling since 1990.

By learning how to reuse leftover food to feed humans and animals, and lastly, to produce energy and compost, food waste can become a valuable input to close nutrient cycles. On WED 2015, join Food Tank and BCFN in protecting the Earth’s natural resources from farm to fork by putting an end to food waste around the world.

Here are 10 facts you might not know about food waste:

1. 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year
2. This amounts to US$1 trillion dollars of wasted or lost food
3. If wasted food was a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the United States and China
4. Just one quarter of all wasted food could feed the 795 million undernourished people around the world who suffer from hunger
5. Food waste in rich countries (222 million tons) is approximately equivalent to all of the food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons)
6. A European or North American consumer wastes almost 100 kilograms of food annually, which is more than his or her weight (70 kilograms)
7. A European or North American consumer wastes 15 times more food than a typical African consumer
8. Lack of technology and infrastructure is the main cause of food waste in Africa, as opposed to household food waste in the developed world
9. Food waste in Europe alone could feed 200 million hungry people
10. Food waste generates 3.3 billions tons of carbon dioxide, which accelerates global climate change
11. ***********************************THANK YOU*********************************