The Summit opened a dialogue on significant global food waste challenges.
This year’s event focused on furthering the dialogue on significant global food waste challenges. One in nine people on earth goes to bed hungry each day while 2.5 billion suffer from some form of nutritional deficiency. Meanwhile, one third or more of all food produced never makes it to a consumer. As the earth’s population approaches 9 billion people in 2050 – two thirds of which will live in urban areas away from the source of food supply – the solution of simply “growing more” needs to be challenged. By bringing together some of the world’s foremost minds on the issue of food waste, the Summit aims to do exactly that.
Every day 805 million people suffer from hunger. Yet, every year one-third or more of our global food supply is wasted. That’s food that never makes it from the farm to our fork. It’s food that decays in fields before harvest, spoils in poor transportation conditions, is lost in markets before consumers can buy it or is thrown away at home, when people buy too much. That combined food wastage impacts more than hunger, it also has a significant environmental consequence. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the embodied CO2 in the food we waste represents 3.6B metric tons of CO2 – compared at a country level, that would make food wastage the third largest emitter of CO2 in the world. What’s more, the FAO estimates the water used to grow the food we waste is greater than the water used by any single nation.
Making a bold declaration at its World Cold Chain Summit to Reduce Food Waste in Singapore last month, Carrier, a world leader in high-technology heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration solutions, delivered a call to action to begin “The Age of Food Efficiency.” The conference, which was held for the first time in Asia, convened 131 delegates from 33 nations, including global leaders in the supply chain private sector, academia, and government to discuss and develop scalable, sustainable solutions to expand and improve the cold chain to reduce food loss and waste. Carrier is a part of UTC Climate, Controls & Security, a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE:UTX).
Keynote speakers at the two-day conference included Dr. Joseph Mpagalile, Agro-food Industries officer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Didier Coulomb, general director of the International Institute of Refrigeration; and Clementine O’Connor, sustainable food systems consultant, United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Top takeaways from the Summit include:
The Summit endorsed the new United Nations Sustainable Development 12.3 Goal that calls for halving food waste – at retail and consumer levels, as well as reducing food losses along the entire global food supply chain – by 2030.
The FAO is considering a new Cold Chain Coalition to fight food waste in developing countries.
The International Institute of Refrigeration estimates 23 percent of food loss and waste in developing countries is due to the lack of a cold chain. For perspective, Ethiopia has just 2 liters per person of refrigeration compared to 344 per person in the U.S.
A new, independent study shows that greenhouse gas emissions associated with food waste could see a 10-fold net reduction if developing countries have the same level of cold chain implementation as the developed world. This is powerful evidence that a green cold chain can be effective not only in feeding more people, but taking a bite out of the astounding 3.6 gigatons of CO2associated with food waste every year. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The study confirms that clear improvements are achievable.
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Source: <a href="
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