A plan for reducing food loss and wastage

In a recent study, published by the World Resources Institute, researchers explored 10 scaling interventions that could help reduce food loss and waste across supply chains and geographies. According to the report, ‘Reducing Food Loss and Waste: Ten Interventions to Scale Impact’, governments, businesses, farmers, consumers, and everyone in between need to play a role in implementing these interventions.

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Figuring out how the world can adequately and nutritiously feed nearly 10 billion people by the year 2050 in a manner that advances human wellbeing, while also reducing the food system’s impact on the environment, particularly on climate change, is one of the grand challenges of this half-century.

Previous studies have found that addressing this challenge will entail closing the gap between the food needed by 2050 and that available today, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from business-as-usual agriculture and related land-use change by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement on climate change.

One critical intervention for achieving both is to reduce the current rate of food loss and waste by 50%. Reducing food loss and waste, and thereby increasing the amount of food harvested that ultimately gets eaten by people, is an important strategy for ensuring food security and combating climate change. In addition, reducing the rate of food loss and waste by 50% would significantly reduce GHG emissions because more efficient use of food would diminish the need for land conversion for additional food production, slow the rate of increase in fertiliser applications, and reduce methane emissions from food in landfills.

Recent modelling found that doing so would close the gap between the amount of food needed to adequately feed the planet in 2050, and the amount of food available in 2010 by more than 20%. It was also found that a 50% reduction in the rate of food loss and waste would reduce the food system’s projected business-as-usual GHG emissions in 2050 by 10% to 14%.

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE?