Reducing food waste is key for the future of the planet

Thought leaders, visionaries and change-makers are coming together to celebrate Dubai Expo 2020's Food, Agriculture and Livelihoods Week, which began on 17 February and will end on 23 February. The main objective of the Thematic Week is to explore ways to make food systems more productive, more inclusive of disadvantaged and marginalised populations, environmentally sustainable and resilient, and to provide healthy and nutritious diets for all.

The World Majlis: The Value of Food Forum session, held at the Terra-The Sustainability Pavilion, exchanged ideas about food supply chains and how to make them more efficient and avoid food waste. They also addressed issues such as obesity and famine. The pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of global food systems.

However, all participants agreed on the reduction of food waste as a key actor in the future of human beings, but above all for the planet earth. Food reduction poses a social, environmental and economic challenge and must be addressed collectively as it has a global impact, the attendees reported. 

According to Sally Mousa, an international speaker and presenter in the United Arab Emirates, "food loss and waste is responsible for approximately 8% of global CO2 emissions, and the economic costs of food loss are estimated at $400 billion per year". "One in nine people worldwide is undernourished, while up to a third of all food on the planet is lost or wasted," she added.

"Everyone involved in the food cycle, from production to consumption, must work together to restructure the system by which we get our food and reduce food loss and waste," said Meiny Prins, CEO and co-owner of Priva. "The way we produce food today has an impact on climate change, but climate change is also affecting the way we produce food. That's going to give us a lot of stress in the coming decades. We have to realise that if we only have 20 years from now to make sure that billions of people don't starve, we have to act very quickly," the CEO added.

Louise Nash, founder and CEO of Circularity in New Zealand, noted that "the system we are operating in is inherently broken. When we have that amount of food waste going out, something is wrong. What we're proposing is a radical redesign of it to work with nature, not against it, to think about how we allow food, nutrients, to flow in a circular way just like in nature. There is no waste in nature".

This is the ninth of ten Thematic Weeks being held since the launch of Expo Dubai 2020 in October last year, which are part of the People and Planet Programme, Food, Agriculture and Livelihoods Week. The programme aims to serve as a platform for the exchange of inspiring new perspectives to address the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time.