Time for Action on Food Waste

After spending the last 10 years meeting the needs of consumers and clients in the Food Service industry, my first visit to the United Nations at their headquarters in New York to participate in Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) conversation on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was stimulating and inspiring.

We are facing some of the most important decisions related to our collective future on one of the most rudimentary pillars of our society, food & and its security.  The fight to achieve food security, malnutrition and end hunger is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today and in the coming years. Globally, close to one billion people are undernourished and a further billion are overweight or obese.

Rising populations, diminishing resources and deteriorating environments only raise the stakes. In a world where one third of the food we produce is thrown away, we cannot help but ask ourselves the question: Could food wastage and hunger be an expression of the same problem?

Navigating through so many countries, regions, cultures, environments and needs is not an easy task by any means. However, considering the urgency and magnitude of the issues, the UN member countries, in late 2015, signed off on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that would provide the impetus to address these global challenges, including three Goals (2, 3 and 12) focusing on Food Security, Health and Waste, respectively.

The emphasis now must be on building a firm and durable foundation for the engagement and participation of all stakeholders, including the private sector, academia, civil society and non-governmental organizations, in the process of taking effective actions for the implementation of the Goals. Agreed targets and standardized measurement mechanisms are fundamental and critical to the firm and durable foundation that we seek to underpin the success of these efforts. 

Our world is digitally and socially very connected. However, awareness of this looming crisis and its criticality is relatively negligible. It’s time to activate our networks and use this opportunity of the SDGs to generate awareness that can translate into tangible actions.

I feel excited and energized to be part of a team at Emerging Ag that is as passionate as I am about encouraging entities in the agriculture and food sector – global, national and local – to drive this change and be active stakeholders in securing our future on food for generations to come.