Here's my contribution to the debate scheduled for next year; and currently due for completion by 30 April 2013.
Contribution - Taking account of information already available - Prevention of Food Losses (PFL) Programme
It's always difficult keeping track of work undertaken earlier, and particularly when the people involved have moved on and the work undertaken may have been originally designed to explore parallel avenues of development. There is also this thing about materials filed and largely forgotten; it is sometimes easier to re-explore similar objectives with the funds and enthusiasm of those involved in the current day. Thus it is with the FAO PFL Programme. PFL? This is the 'Prevention of Food losses' Programme which, like other institutional action programmes of its kind, eventually staggered to a halt (in this case in the early 1990s) as a result of declining interest at the time. Yet the work undertaken included much that remains relevant to the current study.
There is this thing about corporate memory and too, the topicality of current R&D investigations. Your scoping paper to which you refer 'Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems' references six sources of information from the past two years. Included in this list is the key document 'Global food losses and food waste: extent, causes and prevention' that dates from 2011. It lists 10 reference sources and, again, draws upon information that is relatively new (<7 years dated, apart from a single fisheries source from 1994). What this Gustavsson/Cederberg/Sonneson document does do well, however, is to list an estimated 150 alternative sources of information.
For the keen of eye, this listing included the FAO INPHO network (shared with CIRAD & GTZ) - the Information Network on Post-Harvest Operations that was first established in the mid-1990s; as a means of handling the wealth of information originally derived from the PFL Programme. You can find out more about this resource at: www.fao.org/inpho, but you would need to dig deeper to explore the PFL Programme and it's heritage value.
To assist - and assuming that this is of interest to the network of contributors - some additional information is attached.
Peter Steele
Rome
14 April 2013
Peter Steele