Stop Food Loss to Counter Climate Change

Artificial refrigerant gases cause global warming... and so do decomposing gases from wasted food

India has the world’s largest footprint in cold stores. Recent estimates indicate that over the last few decades we have created 130 million cubic metres of refrigerated warehousing space. Most importantly, 97% of these happen to be users of natural refrigerant gases – in effect this is the world’s largest collection of users of ammonia based refrigeration. This is not a petty matter, as most of the developed world has cold stores that deploy artificial refrigerants. Unlike ammonia, these artificial fluids - Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) - either caused Ozone depletion or are negatively impacting Global Warming.

In Europe alone, reports indicate that almost 50% of their food chain refrigeration is using such gases with a thousand times higher global warming potential (GWP) than CO2. Ammonia on the other hand, extensively used in India, has zero GWP.

Doubling of Farmers' Income

In day-to-day conversation, a number of terms sometimes lead to confusion, especially when the words involved are in disconnect from colloquial and professional context. Revenue and profit are often used interchangeably by the average person, but these terms have separate meanings, albeit profit being an outcome of revenue. Contextual clarity on terminology is important to avoid confusion of intent or action. 

Value Realisation is directly linked to market connectivity, waste occurs when connections fail.

Revenue is a synonym for income, whereas profit mean net income. Profit, in simple terms, means the income or revenue that remains after all expenses.

Increase in Farm Yields is not always Revenue Generating

Logistics Connectivity is Key to Reduce Food Loss

Food has one end-use, to be consumed...food loss or waste occurs when food left unconsumed - or, when food perishes before it could reach the market within its normal saleable life cycle.

Food loss can be reduced... only by ensuring that all the harvested produce reaches its logical end use. This means that food delivery mechanisms must also aim to counter the perishable nature of food, to extend its saleable life cycle.

Perspective on India's Cold-chain

India has developed an enviable capacity in the cold storage format across the country. As per the 2014 report of IARW (International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses), India had 131 million cubic metres in cold storage capacity, overtaking USA which has 115 million cubic metres. China has the third largest capacity globally with about 76 million cubic metres in cold storage space. The worldwide capacity in refrigerated warehouses was reported as 552 million cubic metres in this report by IARW. Between May 2014 and July of 2015, India added another 200 units or a little more than one million tons to its cold storage space. Though about 5% of the facilities may have become obsolete over the years, India can now lay claim to having created almost 7200 cold stores equivalent to about 33 million tons in holding size, most of these over the past decade.

Meeting the Global Food Crisis

There is a Food Crisis in our world - can it truly be met by sowing more crops, increasing farm level yields, to store that food in banks? These are among some topics I mooted when speaking on the subject at UK's House of Lords.

There ought to be no doubt that there exists a global food crisis! Across the world, 795 million people suffer from hunger - Hunger is defined as a painful sensation from want of food! This pain afflicts 525 million people in Asia, 215 million in Africa, 37 million in Latin America & Caribbean and others. Women form 60% of these numbers and a child dies every 10 seconds from hunger related inflictions.

What is notable, is that this food crisis is most prevalent in producing regions, areas that have a food surplus, not food shortage. The question is why? Why is it, the producing areas face more hunger?

The Chain, Interrupted or unInterrupted

Cold-chain value systems and options to be considered by planners. (also see Visions and Value chains)

1. The strategic business interest & capability of any concerned enterprise will define the scope and extent of the value chain of each such enterprise. Frankly, the involved models are easily differentiated and would extend across the following two basic categories-

 

a. Uninterrupted farm-to-fork sourcing and distribution of agricultural produce, especially perishables, wherein the fresh whole food does not undergo any change to its primary and natural characteristics. This value chain system is empowered with the agri-logistics intervention that services an out-reach into multiple markets through connectivity. This market link is key to generate a revenue stream that is volume based, and in turn feeds improved post-harvest handling, resultant growth in produce quality & productivity and also offers scope to stabilise demand-supply fluctuations.

Pre-conditioning fresh farm produce

What the budget proposal means for cold-chain. 

(Union Budget of India 2015-16)

It is amply clear that to properly utilise the cold-chain, and to initiate a supply of fresh farm produce to consumers, the supply chain operator, at the source end (farm gate), needs to prepare the harvested produce for travel from farm gate to market. This involves pre-conditioning procedures (e.g. washing, waxing, de-sapping), retail packaging and labelling, pre-cooling, before undergoing climate controlled storage and transportation and ripening. None of these measures alter the essential characteristics of agricultural produce as no food processing is involved – the farm produce is delivered fresh and whole, from farm to market. These preconditioning procedures make it possible for agricultural produce to be marketed more efficiently and help to reduce losses in supply chain and to prolong the freshness of produce. 

Under the provisions in India’s Finance Act, in regards to service tax (see Section 66D (d) (iii) of Chapter 5 of Finance Act 1994 and Chapter VA of Finance Act 2003), processes carried out at an agricultural farm which do not alter the essential characteristics of agricultural produce but only make it marketable for the primary market do not fall under the Negative List. However, elsewhere (Section 65B(5) of the Act), “agricultural produce” is defined to mean any produce of agriculture on which either no further processing is done or such processing is done as is usually done by a cultivator or producer.

Insights into Food Loss and Waste

A High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) was established by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) in 2010 as the science-policy interface of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). On 3 July 2014, the HLPE published report #8 titled “Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems”. 

At its onset, the report states that accurate estimates of losses in the food system are unavailable, though it reiterates that best evidence at hand indicates that global food waste stands at 1/3rd of production. It goes on to state that myriad approaches to defining food losses and waste tend to be confounding.

For the referenced report, the following definitions are used. Food Loss and Waste (FLW) is “a decrease, at all stages of the food chain from harvest to consumption, in mass, of food that was originally intended for human consumption, regardless of the cause”. Some key phrases here is “in mass” and “for human consumption”.

Food Loss & Waste (FLW) has two distinct components – food loss occurring before consumption and food waste occurring at consumption level.

Cold-chain in relation to Food losses

Cold-chain does not directly reduce food loss - it is incongruous to proceed with that as the key premise. Cold-chain can only help take food to intended uses, preferably directly from farm-to-fork.

Food has one use, to be consumed, and food is lost when not consumed. Food loss can be reduced by facilitating that the produce reaches all logical and feasible end uses.

The idea of cold-chain is not to preserve endlessly, it only applies technology to extend the marketable life of a perishable product, for a finite duration.