By Daniela Godoy
The United Nations Basic Meeting established September 29 because the Worldwide Day of Consciousness of Meals Loss and Waste to advertise insurance policies that scale back poverty and starvation and assist fight local weather change.
This can be a debate that we can not ignore. The Meals and Agriculture Group of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11.6% of meals manufacturing is misplaced between the post-harvest stage and retail, not together with the latter. In response to figures from the United Nations Setting Programme (UNEP), 19% of the entire meals provide is wasted, together with waste in households, meals providers, and retailers worldwide.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, meals losses and waste (FLW) generate a carbon footprint of 300 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), representing about 540 kg of CO2 per individual per 12 months, exceeding the world common of 500 kg.
FLW is a worldwide downside with far-reaching financial, social, and environmental penalties, and its prevention and discount require complete insurance policies and actions promoted by the completely different sectors and actors in agrifood methods.
Given this, technological improvements seem like a brand new answer to lowering the affect of meals losses and waste on local weather change on our planet.
To stop and mitigate the impacts of FLWs, it’s important to advertise applied sciences for the environment friendly use of pure sources and power that scale back environmental air pollution and greenhouse fuel emissions throughout manufacturing processes, prolonging the shelf lifetime of meals, sustaining its security throughout post-harvest, storage or processing.
Thus, revolutionary initiatives equivalent to biotechnological strategies to remodel expired meals into uncooked materials for the animal feeding business, the implementation of sensible packaging, or blockchain methods to keep away from meals waste for causes that don’t have anything to do with its security could make a distinction on this matter.
These applied sciences may help the transfer in direction of round fashions to make extra environment friendly use of sources and reuse meals loss and waste streams, reaching, for instance, the restoration and redistribution of meals equivalent to minimally processed fruits, greens, cereals, and tubers for social tasks or meals banks. Likewise, these improvements might make it potential to handle waste at school feeding packages and meals providers or to plan product advertising and/or rotation at sale factors for remaining consumption.
The prevention of FLW continues to pose regional challenges, equivalent to entry to financing for technological improvements, extra environment friendly practices in household farming or small-scale manufacturing, and the technology of information to find out how a lot meals is misplaced or wasted, the place within the provide chain it’s concentrated, and what the causes are.
Lowering and stopping meals losses and waste is crucial for remodeling agrifood methods into methods which can be extra environment friendly, resilient, inclusive, and sustainable. This may scale back the local weather footprint throughout manufacturing and consumption and contribute to meals safety and vitamin. Selling new applied sciences is a mandate to attain this.
(Daniela Godoy is Senior Coverage Officer in Meals Safety and Diet at FAO’s Regional Workplace for Latina America and the Caribbean)
