Post harvest technologies (2)

1. Food (In)Security and Waste: Lessons from the Pandemic https://www.postharvest.com/

2. Since March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has caused a severe economic downturn and generated a spike in food insecurity in the country for Post harvest technologies. At the same time, farmers had to destroy significant quantities of food because they could not find markets for their products. The crisis has revealed weaknesses and contradictions in our food system but also opens up opportunities for reform. A lack of resilience in our food system. Both supply and demand were drastically impacted. While cattle kept producing milk and vegetables kept growing, shortages in farm labor made it difficult to exploit and harvest them. Many open-air markets, restaurants, schools, and other food service operations had to close, and exports mostly decreased. Even though consumers are buying more in grocery stores, they overall eat less of fresh—and perishable—products such as meat, produce, and seafood. .

3. Pivoting to different markets is particularly difficult for large-scale, hyper-specialized companies with specific infrastructure and without a diversified range of business partners. For example, farmers that were selling milk to schools were not able to re-package it for retail stores. Long and centralized supply chains appeared to be less resilient than smaller and regionalized chains. The crisis made it clear that workers along the food chain are essential since labor shortages have caused both large amounts of losses and food insecurity. Yet labor has long been undervalued in the food system, and both farmers and food service workers can be victims of food insecurity themselves. Future Food losses globalpolicies should re-value the work of those who produce and distribute our food, and support fair wages, purchasing power, and access to quality food in the first place. Policies should also ensure better logistical and financial support to those (mostly unpaid workers) who redistribute our food, which also helps reduce waste.

4. We need a buffer of extra food that generates a certain level of waste in order to face a situation like this one, and also to ensure healthy and tasty diets as well as food safety. There are inherent trade-offs: fresh vegetables that we tend to consume more out of the home, for example, generate more wastebut are also healthier than many of their less perishable counterparts. School lunch programsare also a source of food waste, but they considerably improve children’s diets, especially among underprivileged populations for Sustainability courses.