Considerations on a better food system for World Food Day
16 October is World Food Day, an international day to commemorate the date of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). For ICLEI Oceania, it is a day to reflect on the significant challenges we see across our member cities and regions on issues like waste, nutrition and food sovereignty.
Across Australia, a research-based public sensibility campaign to address critical food waste is set to go live soon. The campaign The Great Unwaste follows the completion of three years of research by the End Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre. The data on food waste in Australia is stark. A third of all food waste in Australia is generated in homes – with Australian households throwing out almost 2.5 million tonnes of food each year, and over half of the food wasted is edible - the equivalent of 7.7 million edible meals annually.
For ICLEI, as is captured in our CityFood flagship, food loss and waste (FLW) is significantly reduced by food systems that work in balance across the three “Hs”: Healthy People, Healthy Landscape, and Healthy Climate.
While food waste data for New Zealand is slightly better than Australia’s, Kiwis still waste $3.2 billion worth of food. Not only is this a significant financial loss for households, it also contributes to four percent of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions, as highlighted by the national behaviour and education campaign Love Food Hate Waste.
Food waste takes on a very different form in the Pacific. Many islands have short farm-to-market supply chains but there are multiple points in the value chain where valuable food is lost such as from distribution to storage and processing. Transportation, which is typically limited in the Pacific Islands, could be a critical weak link in farm-to-market supply chains and flooding as extreme weather deteriorates vital infrastructure. Recent research investigating food loss in the Pacific Islands considered how gender inequality and a lack of gender awareness within value chains can also affect food production.
Be it through strategies to work with cities like Porto on fighting food waste, working in partnership with communities in Kiribati on food sovereignty or helping drive multi-city collaboration around better food procurement for schools, ICLEI is committed to a fairer and healthier food system for our members and partners.
Written by Luigi Zarro