This book explores policies on food waste and loss from around the world, including France, Italy, Romania, Japan, China and the United States. It is aimed at students, academics and policymakers.

This policy brief from UK food waste NGO Feedback sets out recommendations for how to make the food surplus sector in the UK sustainable and inclusive. It stresses that the top priority should be to reduce food surplus in the first place, followed by effective redistribution of unpreventable food waste.

This report from the Food Systems Handbook examines the impacts of crop pests and diseases on food security and farmer livelihoods, drawing on a roundtable of experts held in August 2021. It discusses the scale of the problems, the additional impacts that climate change is likely to have, and various interventions including genetic engineering, early warning systems, integrated pest management, post-harvest storage techniques, crop diversity, and legumes to enhance the soil biome.

Table member Tom Quested has co-authored this report for the United Nations Environment Programme. The report presents up-to-date and comprehensive estimates of food waste around the world, based on the collation of a large number of national estimates of food waste. It also presents a methodology for countries to measure food waste consistently. The report focuses on waste from households, food service and retail.

UK supermarket Iceland has reduced its food waste by 23% over two years, according to this report. In 2019/2020, Iceland wasted food equivalent to 0.57% of sales. None of this waste went to landfill. The majority of food waste went to anaerobic digestion, with some surplus bread being converted to animal feed. Small amounts of surplus food were redistributed to people in need or used to brew beer.

FCRN member Margareta Lelea of the German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture (DITSL) has co-authored this paper, which uses the example of the pineapple supply chain in Uganda to argue that efforts to reduce post-harvest losses often neglect the uses of waste streams by local people.

This book addresses food loss and waste from a range of perspectives, looking at key stages in the supply chain, different types of commodity and different regions in the world.

This report from the World Resources Institute outlines ten “scaling interventions” that could increase both the rate and geographic spread of initiatives to cut food loss and food waste, to support a target of halving worldwide food loss and waste by 2030.