Article
Food Losses and Waste: A Needed Assessment for Future Policies
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
(2021)
Abstract
About one third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. For this
reason, food losses and waste has become a key priority within worldwide policy circles. This is a
major global issue that not only threatens the viability of a sustainable food system but also generates
negative externalities in environmental terms. The avoidance of this forbidding wastage would
have a positive economic impact on national economies in terms of resource savings. In this paper
we look beyond this somewhat traditional resource savings angle and we shift the focus to explore
the distributional consequences of food losses and waste reduction using a resource constrained
modeling perspective. The impact due to the behavioral shift of each household is therefore explained
by two factors. One is the amount of resources saved when the behavioral shift takes place, whereas
the other one has to do with the position of households in the food supply chain. By considering the
whole supply chain, instead of the common approach based only in reducing waste by consumers,
we enrich the empirical knowledge of this issue and improve the quantification of its economic
impact. We examine data for three EU countries that present different economic structures (Germany,
Spain and Poland) so as to have a broader and more robust viewpoint of the potential results. We
find that distributional effects are different for consumers and producers and also across countries.
Our results could be useful for policymakers since they indicate that policies should not be driven
merely by the size waste but rather on its position within the food supply chain.
Keywords
- Linear multipliers,
- social accounting,
- food waste
Disciplines
Publication Date
Fall November 4, 2021
DOI
https:// doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111586
Citation Information
M. Carmen Delgado, Alejandro Cardenete, Pilar Campoy and Ferran Sancho. "Food Losses and Waste: A Needed Assessment for Future Policies" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health Vol. 18 (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ferran_sancho/79/