Building a Sustainable Food Supply Chain and Managing Food Losses

Introduction

As per the United Nations – UN - (2015), the world population will increase by more than one billion people within the next one and half decades to reach 8.5 billion in 2030. This projected population growth, which is concentrated mainly in the developing countries (UN, 2015), raises many challenges for the future of humanity since all the major global problems such as climate change, energy crisis, severe poverty, food scarcity, and economic and political instability relate to population growth in some way (Population Institute, 2017). Uncontrollable population growth has placed millions of people around the world at the risk of hunger leading to a massive and destructive food crisis (Holt-Giménez, 2008; Govindan, 2017). In order to address this global issue, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) identifies zero hunger as one of its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be realized by 2030 (UNDP, 2017).

The world food crisis has many facets and it is pertinent to focus on food supply chain management by emphasizing two extreme consequences: a) food scarcity and b) food waste. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) (2011), food waste in rich countries is almost the same as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa. The food crisis in certain parts of Africa is so severe that it can end in famine. Refer Illustration 1 for more details of the food crisis in East Africa. Globally, 28% of the world's agricultural area is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted. Further, it is estimated that 26% of children in the world are stunted due to malnutrition and two billion people suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies. FAO (2011) further states that one third of the edible food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted along the global food supply chain. The amount of resource inputs to generate this waste and its contribution to greenhouse gas emission intensify the impact of food waste and warns global communities to pay more attention to ensure sustainability of the food supply chains and to minimize food waste by proper management and control. It is evident that the loss of resources in terms of edible food mass, time, energy and cost spent on converting crop into edible food that is being wasted results in direct losses arising from unsustainable food supply chains. Concurrently its environmental impact intensifies the adverse implications of unsustainable food supply chain practices (Nellemann, Macdevetta, Manders, Eickhout, Svihus, Prins, & Kalterrnborn, 2009). Thus, ensuring sustainability throughout the food supply chain has become a major challenge for global communities at present. However, the issue of food waste/loss has not been addressed from a supply chain perspective so far.