This new edition of the report focuses on food losses and waste, providing new estimates of the world’s food post-harvest up to, but excluding, the retail level.
Addressing policy makers, the report also offers a comprehensive analysis of the critical loss points in specific supply chains, thus providing examples on appropriate measures for an effective reduction.
Fourteen percent of the food produced globally is lost during the post-harvest production stage before reaching the retail stage of the food system, according to the newly-released FAO 2019 State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report. While significant, this figure is less than an earlier FAO loss estimate of one-third of all food. Some regional losses are higher, reaching over 15% in North America and Europe and over 20% in Central and South Asia.
Governments, humanitarian agencies, and private sector actors have all recognized the important role that reducing food loss and waste plays in improving food security and nutrition, promoting sustainable environmental practices and natural resource use, and lowering food production costs. Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for reducing per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and food losses along global production and supply chains by half by 2030. This supports the other SDGs, including the SDG Target 2 goal of zero hunger by 2030.
Feeding the world population in an environmentally sustainable manner will become increasingly challenging over the coming decades. The global demand for agricultural outputs is forecast to increase by 35–50 percent between 2012 and 2050 as a result of population and income growth. Meeting this demand will further strain the world’s natural resources and may cause considerable environmental damage, including climate change, land degradation, water scarcity, water pollution and loss of biodiversity.
Against this background, food loss and waste reduction is seen as a way to improve the environmental sustainability of the global food system.