Reducing food loss and waste: Setting a global agenda
This report (PDF) by the World Resources Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation lays out a global action agenda that will help reduce food loss and waste. Reducing food loss and waste is an important strategy to help meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The benefits of reducing food loss and waste can be significant, it would for example close the gap between food needed in 2050 and food available in 2010 bij more than 20 percent. The underlying drivers of food loss and waste are closely interrelated. Among these drivers, some are more relevant in certain regions. The report identifies a three-pronged approach to halve food loss and waste by 2030. The report calls on governments, companies, farmers, consumers, and everyone in between to: 1) “Target-Measure-Act”: Set food loss and waste reduction targets, measure to identify hotspots of food loss and waste and monitor progress over time, and take action on the hotspots. Progress has been made toward implementing some aspects of Target- Measure-Act. In terms of setting targets, 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in a country that has set an explicit, public target; 2) Pursue a short “to-do” list per player in the food supply chain as “no regret” first steps toward taking action. 3) Collaborate on 10 “scaling interventions” to ramp up deployment of Target-Measure-Act and the to-do list to make sure the progress is going on faster. These scaling interventions include whole supply chain approaches, hotspot-specific approaches and enabling approaches.