Reducing Food Loss and Waste to Enhance Food Security and Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

While food shortage remains a big concern in many regions around the world, almost one-third of the total food production is discarded as food loss and waste (FLW). This is associated with about one-quarter of land, water, and fertilizer used for crop production, even though resources and environmental constraints are expected to limit food production around the world. FLW reduction represents a potential opportunity to enhance both food security and environmental sustainability and therefore has received considerable attention recently. By reviewing the recent progress and new developments in the literature, this paper highlights the importance of FLW prevention as a complementary solution to address the Grand Challenge of global food security and environmental sustainability. However, raising awareness only is not enough to realize the expected FLW reduction. We identify the knowledge gaps and opportunities for research by synthesizing the strategies of FLW reduction and the barriers, including (1) filling the data gaps, (2) quantifying the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of FLW reduction strategies, (3) understanding the scale effects, and (4) exploring the impacts of global transitions. It is urgent to take more aggressive yet scientifically based actions to reduce FLW, which require everyone's involvement along the food supply chain, including policy makers, food producers and suppliers, and food consumers.

Food loss and Waste Reduction as an Integral Part of a Circular Economy

“…The rate of FLW out of total food produced is very similar in developed and developing countries (Kummu et al, 2012;Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016; See Figure 1B).…”

“…In medium-and high-income countries, over half of the FLW occur in distribution and consumption level (Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016;Chaboud and Benoit, 2017), meaning that it is discarded even if it is still suitable for human consumption. In low-income countries, food is lost mostly during the production and post-harvest, mainly due to losses during the handling and storage phase (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2011;Kummu et al, 2012).…”

“…The amount of cropland used to grow this lost and wasted food is 198 million hectares per year (Kummu et al, 2012), which represents one-fifth of the cropland used globally for food crop production, or an area about the size of Mexico (Lipinski et al, 2013). A reduction of FLW will contribute to a decrease in land, water and nutrients use and in environmental externalities (Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016).…”

“…The environmental impact of different FLW has been assessed in several studies (Kummu et al, 2012;Food and Agriculture Organization, 2013;Liu et al, 2013;Song et al, 2015) in terms of GHG emissions, land use, and water consumption per calorie, suggesting that reducing FLW should not be oriented only to those commodities with higher shares of caloric losses, but also paying attention to the overall impacts of each commodity (Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016).…”

“…FLW is also a significant economic loss when we account for the time invested in the production and supply chain, as well as in preparing the land, the use of fertilizers, and other costs caused by agricultural production (Bahadur et al, 2016;Kummu et al, 2016;Shafiee-Jood and Cai, 2016). For the United States, Buzby and Hyman (2012) estimated that in 2008, at the retail and consumer level, the total value of food loss at retail price was around USD165.5 billion.…”