| Project Detail |
Based on the UN’s research, roughly one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted globally, which is about 1.3 billion ton per year. Therefore, it is of vital importance to strengthen partnership among public and private sectors of APEC economies in developing policy recommendations and solutions on reducing post-harvest losses and waste, as well as enhancing food quality and safety, so as to contribute to food security in the Asia-Pacific region. Since APEC is composed of developed and developing economies, the food loss issue raises more concerns to developing economies, whereas the food waste issue to developed economies. The project aims to address post-harvest losses in all stages of the entire food supply chain in the APEC region by strengthening public-private partnership. This project is designed to be implemented in three phases within five years. In Phase I (2013), a three-days seminar will be held in August 2013 in Chinese Taipei, providing (1) a broad understanding of post-harvest food losses; (2) identifying key issues and challenges; (3) formulating the preliminary methodology on food crops; (4) deliberating on the strategies and action plans of cooperation among APEC economies. and facilitating exchanges of best practices from public and private sectors among APEC economies; and (5) promoting exchanges of experience-sharing among APEC economies. Built on the outcomes of Phase 1, Phase II (2014-2016) will convene annual seminar in each year with different themes of post-harvest losses as follows: fruit and vegetables in 2014, fishery and livestock products in 2015, and food wastes issues occurred on the food consumption in 2016, including food wastes from individual household’s food preparation, supermarkets, to restaurants. This project will continue to revise the drafted methodology of APEC food losses assessment after receiving feedback from APEC economies, and extends its application to different types of foods for three consecutive years. Phase III (2017) is to synthesize the previous progress of the project and to generate the final conclusion of policy recommendations, action plans, the final completion of toolkit and dataset, and a consolidated methodology of APEC food losses assessment. The high-level policy dialogue meeting, which concludes the outcomes in the past five year, will be held for an in-depth discussion on the achievements, follow-up policy recommendations and strategies, in order to achieve the goal of APEC food security. Given the complexity of post-harvest food losses issues, the encompassing objectives of this project cannot be achieved in a single year and need to be implemented step by step with a multi-year approach, to ensure the success of the project. Since the realization of this project is hinged on different but closely related themes in each phase, this project not only needs collective cooperation and extensive teamwork among different APEC fora, including ATCWG, PPFS, FSCF, and ABAC, but also requires valuable inputs from other regional and international stakeholders as well as from public and private sectors, to account for the diverse aspects of food losses issues. In this project, the close interconnections and continuous coordination of five-year activities require complementarity of outputs from each phase. A multi-year approach allows cohesive execution and ensures the continuity of project, so it cannot only generate workable and concrete deliverables, but also pave the way for building a milestone for APEC’s food security. APEC Multi-Year Project funds is the best source of funding since it allows the project to be executed in a gradual and continuous fashion and makes the project’s implementation feasible. The fund promotes wide-spectrum collaboration among APEC fora and contributes to the incorporation of inputs from other non-APEC stakeholders and members in private sector. With the support of this far-sighted approach, this project will generate more brainstorming, profound deliberation, and effective strategies and action plans for long-term solutions on reducing food losses and costs. Given that the coverage of the project spans across food crops, fruit and vegetables, fishery and animal products, and food waste, the complexity of food loss issue can only be fully addressed via a multi-year project approach for generating promising conclusions and a useful toolkit of solutions on reducing food losses for APEC economies’ needs. |
