Wasted food means wasting time to meet SDGs, researchers say

WASHINGTON — People in the United Kingdom used to waste 8.3 million tons of nutritious and safe to eat food each year, and Liz Goodwin was disturbed. Calling herself “totally passionate about food waste,” Goodwin, as CEO at the Waste and Resources Action Programme, in 2007 led one of the most comprehensive analyses of household food waste ever conducted to determine how much consumable food was being thrown away in the U.K. and what could be done about it. “We’re not going to solve the climate issue unless we tackle food waste, because food waste accounts for such a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions.” --— Liz Goodwin, CEO, WRAP Following that research, WRAP rolled out a two-pronged approach aimed at reducing food waste by making it easy for people to understand its negative impacts. A U.K.-based consumer campaign showed people how much money they were wasting by allowing food to go bad, an incentive to change their habits. This required giving people tips on how to buy only the food they are able to eat before it goes bad, how to use up leftovers, advice for storing food properly to maximize its shelf life, and educating people on how to properly read date labels. WRAP also worked with retailers to incentivize them to help reduce household food waste by simplifying labels and giving people storage advice right on a product so the consumer knows how to best store an item to maximize freshness. Those efforts led to a 21% reduction in food waste in the U.K. over a 5-year period between 2007-2012. While WRAP’s results were impressive, the movement to reduce food waste, enshrined in 2015 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals, now faces the challenge of continuing to show progress in countries such as the U.K. as well as scaling those successful methods to other high-income countries that waste alarming amounts of food every day. ‘Back in the starting blocks’ Per capita waste by consumers in North America and Europe is between 95-115 kilograms (209-253 pounds) a year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. In the U.S., an estimated 30%-40% of food at the retail and consumer levels never gets eaten, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Countries and therefore things like household food waste are really back in the starting blocks still,” Goodwin said. “We don’t have enough countries doing stuff. We don’t have enough countries measuring what’s happening in their countries or with active programs that are likely to lead to reductions in food waste.” Goodwin, now director of food loss and waste at the World Resources Institute, coordinates Champions 12.3, a group of 40 government, business, and development leaders dedicated to achieving SDG 12.3: halving the world’s food waste by 2030. In order to have a shot at reaching that target, the group, which meets once annually, has set targets for governments and companies in three-year increments. The goal is that nearly every country, along with the world's 50 largest food companies, have set specific food loss and waste targets by 2021, leading to a 10% decrease in food waste and loss globally. Other champions include CEOs of companies such as Unilever and Kellogg Company, International Fund for Agricultural Development President Gilbert F. Houngbo, U.N. Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner, and The Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah. The mix of people involved, Goodwin said, recognizes that both public and private sector attention will be required to make real progress. “Companies are stepping up to the mark. We’re seeing increasing momentum. We’re not there yet and we need them to do more and we need more of them to do more, but there is definitely momentum building among companies,” Goodwin said. “We’re not going to solve the climate issue unless we tackle food waste, because food waste accounts for such a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions.” Education and awareness The Food and Agriculture Organization launched its campaign against food waste and loss, Save Food, in 2011. But Rosa Rolle, a senior enterprise development officer at FAO, said the agenda has become more defined since the 2015 launch of the SDGs and goal 12.3. FAO’s flagship publication, released around October’s World Food Day, will this year focus on food waste and loss. Rolle said education and awareness is the main strategy of the Save Food campaign, including materials for school children. “If you cultivate good habits in children, they remain. It’s very important to teach children how to value food. The reason why, for the most part, food is wasted is because there’s so much of it around, it’s abundant, particularly in the developed world,” Rolle said. “By teaching at a very young age the level of awareness and education of food waste ... they begin to value food more and then in the process, once they grow up with these values, then potentially you have a different attitude that will reduce the amount of waste.” Food waste is considerably higher in high-income countries than in lower-income countries, which are instead more prone to food loss, or losing food earlier in the value chain during production, storage, and processing. But Rolle said FAO has seen interest from low- and middle-income countries in adopting successful food waste techniques for their contexts. This year, FAO will be publishing an educational book on food waste reduction and is in the process of coordinating an international day of awareness about food waste and loss. So progress can be measured, FAO is also developing a food loss index, while the U.N. Environment Programme is developing a similar index for food waste. A research-based approach Finding scalable solutions to food waste is also being tackled from a research perspective, for example with grants from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, which was authorized by the U.S. Congress in 2014 to support innovative partnerships to solve food and agriculture challenges. The Washington-based nonprofit awards grants based on six challenge areas, an original one of which was food waste and loss. A recent FFAR grant was awarded to the Consortium for Innovation in Post-Harvest Loss and Food Waste Reduction, a partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation that includes both Western and LMIC universities. The $5.56 million project allows researchers around the world to learn from one another on successful food waste solutions, and is modeled after Rockefeller’s successful Yieldwise Initiative, launched in 2016. Dirk Maier, an Iowa State University professor who serves as director of the consortium, said research universities are well suited to play a role in solving the issues of food waste and loss, while the partnership with Rockefeller brings “instant credibility” to consortium research around the world. Along with the American universities, it will bring experts in fields such as horticulture, agricultural economics, engineers and transportation logistics from seven overseas institutions to conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments, trials, and surveys. In reviewing grant proposals, FFAR considers how results of proposed research projects can be measured, evaluated, and scaled. This is a particular challenge when it comes to food waste, said Lucyna Kurtyka, a senior scientific program director at FFAR, because of the difficulty in measuring progress. “This is a very complex matrix that participates in this food waste generation,” Kurtyka said. “The question is how can you really address this, change not only the mindset in the case of consumer waste, but also can we make the food system actually a solution to some of the issues like undernutrition, malnutrition, and so on?”