Last month, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IME) published the document “Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not” (WNWN). The documents is a call for urgent action to prevent 50% of all food produced in the world becoming waste. The release of this document also served as a catalyst for a media frenzy which explored the issues of food waste to an extent that had not been previously seen.
WNWN Overview
The issues of food waste were examined in what IME identified in 2010 as the three principal emerging population groups. These included fully developed (e.g Europe), late-stage developing (e.g China) , and newly developing countries (e.g Africa). WNWN states that food wastage within developing nations tends to occur primarily at the farmer-producer end of the supply chain, whereas in full-developed countries such at the UK food wastage is said to occur retail and consumer behaviour. Conflicts which may arise from the finite resources of land and water are preempted in the document. One such example is that the demands for land for use in food production is growing, thus competing with demands for ecosystem preservation and biomass production as a renewable energy source.
WNWN concludes with the sentiment that the UN must work together to help change people’s mindsets on waste and discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers. It offers the following recommendations;
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The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) works with the international engineering community to ensure governments of developed nations put in place programmes that transfer engineering knowledge, design know-how, and suitable technology to newly developing countries. This will help improve produce handling in the harvest, and immediate post harvest stages of food production.
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Governments of rapidly developing countries incorporate waste minimisation thinking into the transport infrastructure and storage facilities currently being planned, engineered and built.
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Governments in developed nations devise and implement policy that changes consumer expectations. These should discourage retailers from wasteful practices that lead to the rejection of food on the basis of cosmetic characteristics, and losses in the home due to excessive purchasing by consumers.
Media Reaction and issues with WNWN.
The media rush which ensued the publication of WNWN could be seen from the front page of London’s Metro newspaper to the Guardian and the Independent, and articles also appeared across the international news board. We at TIR are happy to finally see the topic of global food waste gaining some of the attention it so rightfully deserves, but there are a number of issues with WNWN that we feel must be addressed.
There is evidence that figures used throughout WNWN are dramatised. While these in turn provide for dramatic media coverage, they also lead to misinformation. Additional to this, when referring to the UK, many of these media articles still refer to household waste and do not address industry waste. This is a consequence of the absence of any real discussion of industry waste in the WNWN document.
The article published by the Guardian newspaper raised the following point; “In the UK as much as 30% of vegetable crops are not harvested due to their failure to meet retailers’ exacting standards on physical appearance”. The article criticises “Western consumer demand for cosmetically perfect food”, thus implying that this waste is caused by the consumer. However, all of these articles failed to ask wether supermarkets and wholesalers may have cultivated this situation to their own ends. We must remember that the presentation of food to the consumer is not curated by the consumer.
In failing to address issues and potential solutions within the production chain, we feel that WNWN overlooked a major issue affecting food wastage within what they describe as the full-developed world. At TIR, and through our IFWAP research, we believe that one solution is to ensure that the industry measures it’s waste so that it can be managed. We are calling for mandatory food waste audits and are using our IFWAP research to gain an insight into the industry feasibility of such a tool. We aim to achieve this through our interviewing of workers in the supply chain, from primary producers through to retailers, as well as academics, lobbyists and policy experts. We look forward to sharing our research at our launch date in late April.
It is exciting and encouraging to see the important issue of global food waste addressed by mainstream media publications. It is now time to focus on the solutions, not the problems. We hope that this media event will serve as a catalyst for further action. A glance at the comments sections for both the Guardian and the Independent’s articles reveal that this is an issue which resonates with people in a meaningful way.