Food waste reduction and food poverty alleviation: a system dynamics conceptual model

Abstract

The contradictions between food poverty affecting a large section of the global population and the everyday wastage of food, particularly in high income countries, have raised significant academic and public attention. All actors in the food chain have a role to play in food waste prevention and reduction, including farmers, food manufacturers and processors, caterers and retailers and ultimately consumers. Food surplus redistribution is considered by many as a "win-win" solution for food waste reduction and food poverty mitigation, while others criticize charitable initiatives as inadequate responses, that inhibit governments from responsibly protecting the citizens right to food. This paper frames food assistance as "hybrid systems", situating at the intersection of territorial food, public welfare and third sector voluntary systems. Based on available literature and reflections from previous research examining the discourse surrounding food banks in Italy, we develop a system dynamics conceptual mapping. The aim is to model a set of relations and dynamic mechanisms associated with variables relevant to food waste generation, food recovery for social purposes and food poverty alleviation. The analysis of feedback interactions highlights the (actual and potential) vulnerabilities of food assistance systems that occur when addressing food poverty by reducing food surplus. In summary, as the awareness on food poverty and food surplus rises, incentives to food recovery and redistribution strengthen the role of (voluntary) food assistance actors, increasing their exposure to drivers of change, such as retailers' standards for food surplus prevention. This paper contributes to the current academic debate on charitable food assistance, with insights for policy makers and other system actors.

Opportunities, challenges and trade-offs with decreasing avoidable food waste in the UK

“…Technical, economic, environmental, social and political analysis of the food system is needed to explain observed behaviours, build theories and identify the impact of policy and management actions ( Sterman, 2000 ). Such analyses can be complex, yet they can address important issues in complex systems with multi-causality, stemming from interactions among independent components ( Galli et al, 2019 ; Sterman, 2000 ; Wu and Huang, 2018 ). The employment of the CVORR approach for analysing the surplus surplus avoidable food waste management in a broad perspective uncovered a number of challenges, opportunities and trade-offs related to surplus food redistribution.…”

Regulating surplus: charity and the legal geographies of food waste enclosure

“…Food charity, as governance assemblage, is enacted through the coming together of multiple actors in the private, public and non-profit sectors, each with diverse goals and power positions to influence the laws that shape access to food surplus (or waste) and the resources needed to recover and re-distribute it (Galli et al 2019 ). It is to these rules of this public–private assemblage that the findings in this paper attend to, relying primarily on legal archives, clarifying memos and contracts signed between parties involved in charitable food sourcing and distribution transactions.…”

Introduction: A Framework for Managing Food Waste

“…These interdependencies and complex relations between the actors and activities in the food system are seldom identified. Exceptions to this include studies that have addressed global and intersectoral connections in food waste reduction by adopting a food systems approach (Galli et al 2019), food waste regime approach (Gille 2012) and service ecosystem perspective (Baron et al 2018). These studies highlight that in order to accomplish systemic change towards sustainability, institutional structures need to be disrupted.…”

“…The food bank system, distributing surplus food from retailers to those in need, has existed for decades and operates globally through different formats. However, traditionally it has been organised by the third sector and has not aimed directly at reducing food waste but rather at solving food insecurity (Galli et al 2019;Lohnes and Wilson 2018). In recent years, food waste reduction has started to generate interest in the business sphere as well.…”