KINGSTON, Jamaica – Participants in a recent virtual Food Loss and Waste (FLW) Measurement and Reporting Workshop have lauded the initiative as critical for furthering the island’s food security efforts.

Stakeholders from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining; Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Statistics Division convened on August 23, to explore a practical methodology for the Food Loss and Waste index.

Senior Statistician within the FAO Statistics Division, Carola Fabi, said food loss and waste “is connected to so many indicators and crucial to understanding the resilience of food systems”.

“What Jamaica is doing to embark on the measurement will really help, especially for an island where the food chain is not very long. We are happy that this project is taking place and that the country is not only committing to strategising but also to measuring the data,” she said.

Director of the Agricultural Services Unit (Acting) in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Sheridon Wisdom, said as a nation, “we have to ensure we increase our production”.

“The key to our food and nutrition security is not only producing more but also consuming and utilising more of what we produce. We would have realised that approximately 20-30 per cent of food is wasted, and as such, as a

Ministry, we are targeting to reduce this as much as possible,” he said.

“We want to reduce loss and waste along each supply chain thereby securing Jamaica’s food and nutrition security. We want to map the critical loss points where food is lost in Jamaica to ensure we can better guide our policy decisions,” he added.

Organised through the FAO of the United Nations, with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, the workshop centred around a data-driven approach to tackling FLW issues across the agricultural supply chain.

Part of this approach involves the development of a Food Loss and Waste index.

Representative of the FAO for Jamaica, Dr Crispim Moreira, in a statement issued by the FAO, said the FLW index will allow Jamaica to assess the current levels of food loss and waste across the supply chain, from production to consumption.

“The establishment of a Food Loss and Waste index provides us with an invaluable tool. It enables us to quantitatively assess the extent of food loss and waste across our agricultural supply chain, from the fields where our farmers toil to the plates of our consumers,” he said.

This will provide a clear understanding of where and why food is being lost, enabling the agricultural sector to identify the most critical areas to address.

The hosting of the workshop is aligned with the FAO Regional Initiative on Sustainable Diets and Food Systems, which supports Latin American and Caribbean countries in reducing FLW.

The Ministry’s current efforts to reduce FLW include targeted post-harvest training to farmers for specific crops, sensitisation forums for middlemen and purveyors, improved storage facilities as well as an increased number of cold and ambient storage facilities.

– JIS