The World Can Cut Food Waste and Loss by Half. So Why Haven't We?

The Rockefeller Foundation Launches YieldWise, a $130 Million Initiative to Halve Post-Harvest Loss
May 26, 2016 11:00 AM ET

The New Global Citizen

The earth’s global food system is facing a quiet crisis—one-third of all food produced is never consumed while 1.2 billion people go to bed hungry or under-nourished, as global economic losses mount into the trillions.

This year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The Rockefeller Foundation launched YieldWise, a $130 million initiative to demonstrate how the world can cut food waste and loss in half by 2030. The initiative represents the next chapter in our work to effectively address agriculture and food insecurity, which has spanned more than a century and several continents—from seeding the Green Revolution that fed a billion people across Asia and South America in the 1950s and 1960s, to the work of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) (in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), over the last decade.

While food waste and loss is a global problem, the YieldWise initiative focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, where 70 percent of people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. The continent is also home to many of the world’s food insecure people—those who lack reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable and nutritious food.

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