Impacts of Reducing Global Food Loss and Waste on Food Security, Trade, GHG Emissions and Land Use

Abstract

With global population slated to increase by another 2 billion persons by 2050 combined with agriculture’s existing pressure on natural resources and responsible directly and indirectly for a significant percentage of annual greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the level of losses and wastes in the agro-food complex—from field through to final consumers—would be one option to help reduce the pressures on resources and eliminate hunger. Gustavsson et al. (2011) have estimated these losses and wastes to be on the order of magnitude of 33 percent of agricultural production— with significant differences in their sourcing across countries and regions. It is estimated that 30 to 40% losses occur in developing countries and, therefore, measures to avoid this will have a big effect on food security and food safety. (Engstrom and Carlsson-Kanyama, 2004; Kader, 2005). Furthermore, global food wastage ranks as the third top methane emitter after China and the United States by causing 3.3 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent methane emissions (FAO, 2013a). Thus there is considerable potential scope for reducing food losses and wastes and its impacts on global food security and global greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of reducing global food loss and waste on food security, international trade, GHG emissions and land use. For this purpose, we employ the Simplified International Model of agricultural Prices, Land use and the Environment (SIMPLE).