Agricultural News
Reducing Food Waste Tops Agenda of Businesses for Social Responsibility
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:52:03 CST
At the recent Bayer Crop Science Ag Issues Forum, one of the attendees was Chai Robertson, director of food, beverage and agricultural practices for Businesses for Social Responsibility. Robertson's organization advises about 300 companies on how to adopt more sustainable business practices.
One of the issues that tops the organization's agenda is food waste. Robertson says there is a tremendous amount of food that could be recovered in the United States alone.
"According to the EPA more than 67 billion pounds of food were put into landfills in 2010. That, by many estimates, is a low number because we're missing some key data points. -. Sixty-seven billion pounds, how many people could that feed? We've got 47 million Americans who are living below the poverty line who are struggling to make ends meet. And if you took that 67 billion pounds of food and did the simple math, you'd be able to serve all those 47 million people four meals a day for the entire year."
Robertson says there are numerous reasons for 67 billion pounds of loss all the way from farm to fork.
"At the producer level at the grower level, sometimes it just doesn't economically make sense to pick the food if you can't get the higher price than the cost of harvesting it. Or there's loss because the labor is unavailable to pick the food. In a food processing facility, something may not be produced to spec. It's not what the end customer wants so that could get tossed," she says.
"Then we have consumers like you and I who may over order, or are over served, or otherwise the food goes into the landfill because we aren't keeping it."
The multitude of losses throughout the system make solving the problem an enormous challenge, Roberston says.
"It's a huge challenge because it is so multi-faceted. There's a multitude of answers. On the one hand, it's a distribution problem. We have enough calories to feed the world, we don't have a way to get it out to everybody. So there are logistical answers in terms of improving logistics. And there are groups who are trying to glean produce that isn't harvested off of fields and bring that into the food bank system. There are supermarkets that are looking at how to work more closely with local farmers to provide produce that's no longer edible to turn it into animal feed. So there's really a host of solutions to the issue. Some require new innovations and maybe more or different incentives from government."
The challenges for individual producers are no less daunting, Robertson says.
"It's interesting when you think about farmers. The food that they are producing is going to waste. If I were a farmer, that would really bother me, because there's a lot of resources, a lot of energy, water and time that goes into producing food. There is loss happening at the farm level."
She says, "The economics sometimes just don't make sense, so thinking about how to change that. Whether it's finding markets that can pay the higher price or addressing some of the issues related to labor shortages. These are all very complex, multi-layered problems and not very easy to solve."
You can hear the full interview with Kai Robertson by clicking on the LISTENING BAR below.
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