For the International Food Loss and Waste Awareness Day, French minister of Food and Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, and French minister of Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili, have reaffirmed France’s commitment to reduce food waste by 50% by 2025 and they also launched the reflections for a Pact 3.
The 60 partners who have signed the Pact against food waste, launched in 2013 as part of the French National Food Program, came together on September 29th 2021 to make an assessment of the actions conducted in Pact 2, to present exemplary initiatives and share their reflections for a new framework of collective action.
In a context marked by the global pandemic and climate change, the challenge to drastically reduce losses and food waste is a priority more than ever. At the moment, the amount of food waste is still unacceptable given the growing amount of people living with food insecurity and the need to achieve carbon neutrality. It is estimated that 14% of the food is lost between harvest and marketing, and that 17% of the global food production is wasted. In France, the losses and food waste represented 10 million tons per year in 2016. This waste is the source of unnecessary removal of natural resources, as well as avoidable greenhouse gas emissions.
The creation by the General Assembly of the United Nations of an International Food Loss and Waste Awareness Day on September 29th marks the desire for widespread awareness and the need to take concrete actions at all levels to remedy the situation.
With an ambitious regulatory framework and initiatives deployed at the local level, France is a pioneer in the fight against food waste and, inseparably, in the fight against food insecurity.
During the webinar, those who signed the Pact shared a positive assessment of the conducted actions. Given the challenges, their desire is to go even further in order to reach the national objective of reducing food waste by 50% by 2025, compared to the 2015 levels in food retail and collective catering, and by 50% by 2030 compared to the 2015 levels in consumption, production, processing and commercial catering.
This webinar helped federate and bring together around the same objective all stakeholders in the fight against food waste. Much like the Too Good To Go movement which initiated the Pact on consumption dates and the Associations Solidarity platform - collaborative initiative to facilitate food donations to charities - the fruitful initiatives are multiplying. The creation of the Anti Waste (Anti Gaspi) label marks the desire to promote and support all these initiatives.
The challenge of converging the objectives of food waste reduction and fight against food insecurity was also highlighted. In this respect, the articulation of work conducted as part of the Pact and COCOLUPA (National Coordination Committee for the Fight against Food Waste) launched in September 2020 by the ministers in charge of charities, agriculture and housing, will help meet this double challenge.
Source: agriculture.gouv.fr
Photo: Xavier Remongin / agriculture.gouv.fr