The Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development adopted the own-initiative report by Salvatore Caronna (S&D, IT) on how to avoid food wastage: strategies for a more efficient food chain in the EU and noted that every year in Europe a growing amount of healthy, edible food some estimates say up to 50% is lost along the entire food supply chain, in some cases all the way up to the consumer, and becomes waste. It notes also that a study published by the Commission estimates annual food waste generation in the 27 Member States at approximately 89 million tonnes varying considerably between individual countries and the various sectors, without even considering agricultural food waste or fish catches returned to the sea. Total food waste will have risen to by 40% increase by 2020 unless additional preventive actions or measures are taken.
Members call on the Council, the Commission, the Member States and players in the food supply chain to address as a matter of urgency the problem of food waste along the entire supply and consumption chain and to devise guidelines for improving the efficiency of the food supply chain sector by sector. They call on the Commission, in this context, to raise awareness of the ongoing work in both the High Level Forum for a Better Functioning Food Supply Chain and the European Sustainable Consumption and Production Roundtable, including with regard to recommendations on how to tackle food waste.
Members urge the Council and the Commission to designate 2013 the European Year against Food Waste, as a key information and awareness-raising initiative for European citizens and to focus national governments attention on this important topic, with a view to allocating sufficient funds to tackle the challenges of the near future.
The Commission is asked to:
The Commission and Member States are asked to encourage the exchange of best practice and promote awareness-raising campaigns to inform the public of the value of food and agricultural produce, the causes and effects of food waste and ways of reducing it, thereby fostering a scientific and civic culture guided by the principles of sustainability and solidarity.
Members welcome the initiatives already taken in various Member States aimed at recovering, locally, unsold and discarded products throughout the food supply chain in order to redistribute them to groups of citizens below the minimum income threshold who lack purchasing power. They feel that investing in methods leading to a reduction in food waste could result in a reduction in the losses incurred by agri-food businesses and, consequently, in a lowering of food prices, thus potentially also improving the access to food by poorer segments of the population. The Commission is asked to determine ways and means of better involving agri-food businesses, wholesale markets, shops, distribution chains, public and private caterers, restaurants, public administrations and NGOs in anti-waste practices.
Lastly, the report calls for measures to reduce food waste upstream, such as dual-date labelling (sell by and use by), and the discounted sale of foods close to their expiry date and of damaged goods.