{"id":18907,"date":"2015-09-28T11:57:59","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T15:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress-367309-1145705.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=18907"},"modified":"2015-09-28T11:57:59","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T15:57:59","slug":"global-food-waste-on-the-uns-sustainable-development-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/articles\/global-food-waste-on-the-uns-sustainable-development-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Food Waste On The UN&#8217;s Sustainable Development Agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/the-issue-of-global-food-waste.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"425\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-18908\" src=\"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/the-issue-of-global-food-waste.jpg\" alt=\"the issue of global food waste\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/the-issue-of-global-food-waste.jpg 640w, https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/the-issue-of-global-food-waste-300x199.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve ever seen the film <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0387808\/\">Idiocracy<\/a><\/em>, you may remember that, in addition to a professional wrestler as president and &#8220;it&#8217;s got electrolytes!&#8221;, the city of Washington, D.C. (and likely others) were surrounded by mountains and mountains of trash. I have to wonder if the &#8220;idiots&#8221; of 500 years in the future produced more garbage, or just lost our ability to hide it well. Unless you&#8217;ve ever <a href=\"https:\/\/sustainablog.org\/2012\/09\/landfill-gas-to-energy-plant-opens-in-st-louis\/\">been to a landfill<\/a>, your sense of the scale of our waste disposal may come down to your own trash can and recycling bin&#8230; and that probably doesn&#8217;t strike you as a crisis.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past weekend, though, the issue of global food waste came up as world leaders discussed (and passed) the next round of <a href=\"http:\/\/cleantechnica.com\/2015\/09\/16\/un-study-calls-proactive-policies-institutional-investment-frameworks\/\">sustainable development goals (SDGs<\/a>) at the United Nations. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wri.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/what%E2%80%99s-food-loss-and-waste-got-do-sustainable-development-lot-actually\">Specifically<\/a>, &#8220;SDG Target 12.3 will call for the world to cut per capita food waste in half by 2030.&#8221; That may strike you as impressive or not &#8211; without context, it&#8217;s a little hard to wrap your head around. The World Resource Institute&#8217;s Brian Lipinsky helps on this front by noting:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We waste or lose $750 billion through the food supply chain every year. According to Lipinsky:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world\u2019s poorest and most food-insecure regions, the World Bank <a href=\"http:\/\/siteresources.worldbank.org\/INTARD\/Resources\/MissingFoods10_web.pdf\">estimates<\/a> that just a 1 percent reduction in post-harvest losses could lead to economic gains of $40 million each year. And out of that $40 million, most of the benefits would go directly to the smallholder farmers growing the food.<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Our lost and wasted food produces about 3.3. gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. As we&#8217;ve noted before, if global food waste were a country, it would rank only behind the United States and China in terms of greenhouse gas production.<\/li>\n<li>As world population grows, we&#8217;re going to face bigger challenges in feeding everyone: WRI predicts a 70% gap in the calories we produce now, and what we&#8217;ll need in 2050 to feed roughly 9.5 billion people. Wasting food at the level we do now won&#8217;t help bridge that gap.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>How Do We Meet UN Goals for Reducing Global Food Waste?<\/h3>\n<p>In short, by relying on the mantra &#8220;What gets measured gets managed.&#8221; WRI, along with a number of NGO partners, is in the process of developing a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wri.org\/our-work\/project\/food-loss-waste-protocol\">Food Loss &amp; Waste Protocol<\/a>. According to the organization itself, this tool will &#8220;enable a wide range of entities &#8211; countries, companies and other organizations &#8211; to account for and report in a credible, practical and internationally consistent manner how much food loss and waste is created and identify where it occurs, enabling the targeting of efforts to reduce it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Want to dig into the protocol? There&#8217;s a draft for review available, and the final protocol should be available soon. Take a look, and then let us know what you think: can we avoid those mountains of trash surrounding our cities? Can we feed everyone in the coming decades?<\/p>\n<p>Photo credit: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shutterstock.com\/pic-158945054\/stock-photo-close-up-of-vegetable-compost-pile-in-a-farm-field-to-replenish-the-ground-with-nutrients.html?src=WVeqr03N2uUx-YvkQMzf8g-1-1\">Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most recent versions of the UN&#8217;s Sustainable Development Goals include cutting global food waste in half by 2030. Can we do this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":18908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[100,8564,273,8565,1300,2445,1717,8562,8563,138,1104,1447,3076],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>UN Addresses Global Food Waste<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The most recent versions of the UN&#039;s Sustainable Development Goals include cutting global food waste in half by 2030. 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