Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 1/22/16


Movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, announced the launch of a $130 million, seven-year initiative targeting food waste in developed and developing countries.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Yield Wise Initiative will focus primarily on food crop loss in developing countries, as well as food waste at the consumer and retail level in developed countries.

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, called the global food waste problem a “trillion-dollar crisis … quietly brewing without the same level of anguish that we often place on other important issues that we discuss at Davos every year.”

Rodin noted that one-third of food that farmers produce is tossed in garbage cans or rots where they were just grown. “All of the food lost between the farm and table could feed the 1.2 billion hungry or malnourished in the world in the next two months,” she said.

The loss translates into an ecological impact — a quarter of fresh water and a fifth of all farm land is wasted on unconsumed food. “Put another way, a staggering 66 trillion gallons of water is wasted every year on food that is never eaten,” or more than is consumed by the entire Chinese energy sector, Rodin said.

Then there’s the impact it has on business profit. Every year food loss and waste cost the global economy more than combined 2015 profits of all Fortune 500 companies. “An all-inclusive problem like this calls for all-inclusive solutions,” Rodin said.

Rockefeller is connecting the private and public sectors and nonprofit groups in the food industry with a goal of slashing food waste in half in the next seven years. The vision includes expanding access to technology and connecting global corporations and small famers to “change fundamentally the way food is produced and distributed,” Rodin said at a press conference announcing Yield Wise.

Yield Wise, she said, is the first food-waste effort to the span entire global food supply chain. The initiative will begin in sub-Sahara Africa, where, she noted, that up to half of some crops are lost to inefficient harvesting, storage and processing.

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