Symposium Explores Innovations, Policies and Financing for Food Loss and Waste Transformation
The 2020 World Food Law Symposium, which took place on 12 November 2020, explored innovations, creative financing and supportive legal approaches to transform food loss in commercial or nutritional products. The annual event – co-hosted by the World Food Law Institute and FAO North America – aims to brief experts from the legal and broader community on key food and agricultural policy issues. Marsha Echols, Director of the World Food Law Institute and Professor of Law at Howard University moderated the half-day virtual Symposium, which concludes a series of roundtable discussions that looked at various legal aspects of food loss and waste.
“Even before COVID-19, almost 700 million people suffered from chronic hunger,” stated Vimlendra Sharan, Director of FAO North America in his opening statement. “I think one of the most ethical, moral, social, economic, and environmentally beneficial pathways to alleviate hunger is to ensure that we minimize food loss and waste. It’s a tragedy that one-third of the food we are producing is going to waste and not reaching the intended beneficiaries.”
Daniel Gustafson, Special Representative of the Director-General of FAO, noted that since FAO published the estimate that one-third of food produced is lost or wasted attention on the topic has increased substantially. The Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 aims to cut per capita food waste in half by 2030, and reduce food losses at the farm level. FAO published the first estimate of the Food Loss Index in the 2019 State of Food and Agriculture report. Gustafson added that food loss and waste will also be a key topic at the upcoming 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. COVID-19 has been an “experiment on how food systems adapt, change and are vulnerable, where the fragilities are and also where the opportunities are,” said Gustafson in regard to food shortages and on-farm food losses that occurred at the onset of the pandemic.
Transforming Food Loss into Commercially Useful Products: Case Studies of Innovations
The first panel featured government, private and non-profit sector approaches to transform food loss into commercial and nutritional products, along with a country perspective from the Republic of Ghana.
“Bold and transformative innovation is needed to meet the future demands on agriculture and food,” said Jean C. Buzby, Food Loss and Waste Liaison Officer in the Office of the Chief Economist at the USDA. Buzby highlighted that the Agricultural Research Service, USDA’s chief scientific in-house research agency, develops innovations and solutions to agricultural problems. Recent innovations to reduce food loss and waste include an automatic in-field apple sorter, infrared blanching and dehydration technology for fruit and vegetable snacks, and a new clamshell for fresh storage at the retail and consumer level.
Buzby added that the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) helps support activities at the regional, state and local level by partnering with land grant universities, government agencies, private sector entities and non-profits to help address challenges by providing grants and funds to identify scalable solutions. Furthermore, she shared the Agriculture Innovation Agenda (AIA) whereby the USDA aims to stimulate innovation to increase U.S. agricultural production by 40 percent while cutting the environmental footprint by half by 2050. One of the targets of the AIA agenda is to reduce food loss and waste by 50 percent in the U.S. by 2030. She added that the US is working to improve data and estimation methods to track food loss and waste.
“The more value we can squeeze out of our agricultural commodities, the better it is both for the industry side as well as for the public side,” said Tony Pavel, Senior Food Lawyer at Cargill. He noted that consumer products can also contribute to animal feed, for example, stale potato chips or chocolate can respectively add fats and carbohydrates to animal feed. “The more complex that finished product is, the more ingredients it has, the deeper analysis it requires when you're deciding where it would be appropriate to move into the animal food chain. In addition to that, the products need to maintain good manufacturing practices around holding storage to ensure that there isn't contamination,” elaborated Pavel. Food labeling is another area where the government, private sector, and NGOss are working together to harmonize food labeling dates and educate consumers, he added.
Pavel also highlighted the potential benefits of ingredient innovations for health benefits and food longevity. For example, by using potassium and sodium blends in salt, you can reduce the sodium level in food while maintaining similar taste, texture and preservation. However, there are regulatory barriers to the widespread adoption of this ingredient for foods that have compositional standards, such as cheese.
Providing a non-profit perspective was Jackie Wincek, Procurement and Sustainability Manager at DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), who shared their work tackling food loss and waste in association with reducing food insecurity, unemployment and community health. DCCK sources recovered food from local farms, grocery store, wholesalers, and foodservice companies and uses it for their community meal programs, grab-and-go meals at DC public schools, and for the Healthy Corners initiative which sells deeply discounted produce at corner stores.
With food stuck along the supply chain in the early days of the pandemic, DCCK created the Produce Bag Distribution program, “a commercially useful item that helps us combat food loss, specifically from local farms, supports farms financially, and is ultimately serving the most vulnerable by getting them fresh produce,” said Wincek. Through this program, DCCK invested more than US$1 million in the local farm economy, purchased over 900,000 pounds of produce from local farms, and distributed 5000 bags of fresh, local produce at schools and partner sites each week.
To finish the panel, Stella A. Ansah, Minister-Counselor at the Embassy of the Republic of Ghana in Washington, DC provided a country perspective. She noted that the Ghanaian government is providing farmers with improved seeds to provide food for school feeding programs. Another initiative is One District One Factory (1D1F), where a factory is located locally to source raw materials to support domestic manufacturing, value addition, the export of processed goods, and minimizing food losses.
Reflections of Global Legal Counsel: International Case Studies and Solutions
The second panel featured the first all legal panel in the history of the Symposium with two attorneys representing FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Donata Mary Rugarabamu, Legal Counsel for FAO started off by defining food loss “as the decrease in quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by food suppliers in the chain from the production stage up to but excluding retail food service providers and consumers,” said Rugarabamu. From the national and multinational perspective, she noted that food losses present challenges to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. “Dealing appropriately with food loss would significantly assist in achieving the human rights to adequate food,” she added.
Rugarabamu noted that FAO is taking a leading role in establishing regulatory solutions to food loss at the international level through the intergovernmental Committee on Agriculture which is developing a Voluntary Code of Conduct on Food Loss and Waste Reduction. At the national level, FAO helps countries technically and to develop regulatory approaches to tackle the problem. According to the FAO legislative database, she shared “that many countries are focused on regulation responses on food waste, rather than food loss at this moment.” In conclusion, she noted that regulators need to keep in mind all stages of the production chain, especially the early stages, as well as the environmental benefits.
Katherine Meighan, General Counsel for IFAD, shared the Fund’s activities to reduce food loss during the COVID pandemic. She noted that “14 percent of the world’s food is lost between the harvest and retail stages. The initial research is showing us that this is going up significantly due to COVID-19, and that’s what we have seen on the ground with the farmers whom we work with” Meighan shared. One of the major challenges that farmers in rural communities faced was the lack of inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers, and disruptions in the supply chain due to quarantine restrictions, export bans, and tariff barriers. Meighan provided an overview of the Rural Poor Stimulus Facility (RPSF) that IFAD launched in April 2020 and which aims to improve access to markets, inputs and basic assets, deliver targeted funding, and digital information and services, to accelerate the recovery of communities and build their resilience.
Gizem Eras, Counsellor (Agriculture and Fisheries), Economic and Trade Policy, Embassy of Canada, Washington, DC, was pleased to note that Canada was one of the first countries to contribute to the RPSF initiative. She highlighted that Canada is working to address food loss and waste through the Food Policy for Canada and the Food Waste Reduction Challenge, which brings innovations to reduce food loss and waste in the food processing, grocery retail, and foodservice sectors.
Collaborations for Creative Financing Solutions: Making Solutions Possible
The third panel addressed financing solutions to food loss and waste and featured speakers from the World Bank, Mars, Inc., SOLAAL and Embassy of Philippines in Washington, DC.
“Interventions to reduce food loss and waste are highly context-specific and must take into consideration a government's policy priorities, selected commodities and the structure of the economy,” said Geeta Sethi, Advisor and Global Lead for Food Systems at the World Bank, highlighting a recent study. “Governments need to recognize that food loss and waste is a symptom of a food system not set up to deliver and that addressing food loss and waste is, in fact, a solution to many of their broader policy priorities,” she added. Sethi noted that public financing such as subsidies can be redirected to such causes and that multilateral financing can be used effectively to create enabling environments either for public finances to be repurposed or for risk guarantee for the private sector to come in.
J.B. Cordaro, Special Representative for Mars Inc. talked about assessing the food safety and food loss connection in the context of food systems. “Food loss and food safety are interlinked. We need to improve the food safety ecosystem, as farmers lose billions in income due to contaminated food. Why does business care? Safe food is good business,” said Cordaro. He noted that deciding on concrete actions, interventions and policies to reduce food loss and waste will require precise knowledge of where, why, and how much is lost in the supply chain.
Dorothee Briaumuny, Director for the French consortium SOLAAL talked about public-private partnerships for financing initiatives to fight food loss and waste. In a similar spirit to Cordaro’s presentation, Dorothee highlighted the importance of fostering relationships between governments, the private sector, and NGOs to improve cooperation and work towards the main indicators of SDG 12 on Sustainable Production and Consumption.
Josyline C. Javelosa, Agriculture Attaché of the Embassy of the Philippines in Washington, DC explained that for the Philippines much of the appeal of reducing food loss and waste is to contribute to policy goals of economic efficiency, food security, farmer incomes, trade, sustainability and resilience. Javelosa also shared best practices from the Asia Pacific multi-year project from 2013 to 2018 on strengthening public-private partnerships to reduce food losses in the supply chain.
Ambassador Hans Hoogeveen, Permanent Representative of the Netherlands to the food and agriculture agencies of the United Nations in Rome, provided closing remarks. He spoke about the enormous challenge of having a world with 700 million people affected by hunger, 2 billion people without access to safe, affordable and nutritious foods, and 1.6 billion people living with obesity. “We cannot lose the battle against hunger, food insecurity, and food loss and waste. We have to break silos and collaborate on the global and national levels,” urged Ambassador Hoogeveen. “We have no food or time to waste!”
During the half-day symposium speakers from different sectors highlighted multiple opportunities and benefits of addressing food loss and waste as a means to achieve food security, reduce environmental degradation and enhance economic efficiencies. Food loss and waste cannot be solved by public finance alone but requires the right policy environment to leverage private sector investments and innovations to address the issue and to bring solutions to scale.
Further information
FAO State of Food And Agriculture Food Loss report