I last wrote about the subject of food waste and loss in May of 2016, and a lot has happened in this policy arena over the more than three years that have since elapsed, especially in the United States.
When members of the United Nations endorsed a new set of Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015, one of those goals addressed this issue. Under Goal #12, UN member countries agreed to “ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.” Within that broad objective, they specifically agreed that “By 2030, halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses.”
One of the complications with meeting this objective is that few governments have undertaken the work necessary to accurately estimate the magnitude of this problem within their own borders. In 2018, researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center looked at the existing literature, and found that 10 past studies, conducted between 2010 and 2017, have largely adopted different methodologies and definitions of what constitutes food waste and loss. As a result, their estimates for that category ranged from 158 to 290 kilograms per person per year, just within EU member countries. Globally, the range is even wider, between 194 and 389 kg per person.
In 2018, USDA’s Economic Research Service convened a panel of experts to look at various approaches that could be used to more accurately adjust their procedures for estimating U.S. food availability to account for food spoilage and plate waste that occurs in households on a daily basis. A report compiled by staff at RTI International and several academic agricultural economists laid out a set of recommendations, categorized as top-priority, medium-priority, and low-priority for the agency to consider implementing. However, with the recent hollowing-out of the ERS staff in advance of their move out of Washington DC to Kansas City, it may be a long time until the agency will have the resources to pursue these recommended analytical steps.
In October 2018, the Trump administration announced that it was initiating an inter-agency effort aimed at reducing food waste and loss, with the leadership of the initiative vested at USDA, EPA, and FDA. In April 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency released a two-page strategy document: (https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2019-08/documents/interagency_strategy_on_reducing_food_waste_final.pdf). It is not clear what concrete steps, if any, may have been taken by federal agencies as part of this initiative.
In July of 2019, a bill (HR. 3981) was introduced in the House of Representatives by Representative Chellie Pingree (D, ME), called the Food Date Labeling Act, was aimed at encouraging food retailers to develop consistent practices in putting date information on their retail packages.
The food retailing sector in the United States has already taken significant steps in this area, having launched their own initiative in 2017 to simplify the confusing set of food date labels that consumers see on their grocery shelves. That effort narrowed the preferred choices down to two options: “BEST if used by” or “USE by”, both of which provide similar information to consumers and are not aimed at retail store operators. By the end of 2018, 87 percent of food packages being marketed in this country displayed one of these two options, and the industry expects to reach complete adoption by January 2020.
Analysts at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have been conducting surveys in several developing countries to get a better handle on the magnitude of food waste and loss, including in Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia and China. In a publication released in June 2019, IFPRI reported that they found that food losses in potatoes, maize (corn), beans, teff (a grain crop indigenous to Africa), and wheat value chains range from six percent to 25 percent of total production. Most losses--between 60 and 80 percent--occur at the farm level. Loss of quality is often more important than quantitative loss in the surveyed countries.
A 2016 article in Sustainability suggested that investments in improved storage, transportation, and cooling infrastructure would be helpful in reducing food loss in developing countries. Government programs which make it easier for farmers to acquire technologies such as small-scale rice dryers and threshers, plus new bagging techniques, could make a significant difference in the efficiency of grain processing and storage practices.
