PIM Webinar Series: Measuring food losses: a new methodology - 5/8/2018

Presenter: Eduardo Nakasone, Assistant Research Fellow, IFPRI and Assistant Professor, Michigan State University. The United Nations has recognized the importance of reducing food loss and waste in the Sustainable Development Goal target 12.3 to “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses” by 2030. Despite broad interest in the problem, measurement of food loss and waste is problematical, especially in developing countries. In this webinar, we discuss a methodology to measure food losses developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) team working under the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The survey-based methodology has three main innovations. First, it allows measurement across different nodes of agricultural value chains to pinpoint the locus of loss. Second, it includes the economic value of loss due to quality deterioration as well as physical reduction in quantity. And finally, it characterizes and identifies particular processes in the value chain where food losses occur. We present the results of the application of the method in the value chains of maize and beans (in Guatemala and Honduras), teff (in Ethiopia), wheat (in China), and potatoes (in Ecuador and Peru). We also discuss ongoing work to assess interventions to reduce loss. See more: http://bit.ly/FoodLossWebinar