 Hello and good morning, everybody. Good evening or good afternoon wherever you are in the world. My name is Florian Durer and I'm an associate professional officer at FAO North America. It is my pleasure to serve as your moderator today. On behalf of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and our distinguished speakers, welcome to this webinar on reducing food loss and waste during COVID-19 and beyond. Feel free to let us know who you are and from where you're joining us in the chat box. We encourage you to post your questions to our panelists throughout the webinar in the Q&A box at the center bottom of your screen. Kindly state your name and affiliation and to whom your question is directed. During the Q&A session, we will try to answer as many questions as possible. Follow us on Twitter at FAO North America and join the conversation using the hashtag FAO Insights and Food Waste. Make sure to read the full bios of our distinguished speakers today which will be posted in the chat box. Please note that this webinar is being recorded. Food loss and waste, of course, is not a new problem, but it has gained increased attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic. High levels of food loss and waste, while millions of people go hungry, has always been a central contradiction in our food systems. As millions of people around the world lose their jobs and livelihoods due to the pandemic, news about fresh produce being plowed under, milk being wasted, potatoes being buried and livestock being euthanized have become especially imbarable, multiplying the urgency to address this issue. Let me give you a brief overview of the event. Today we will hear from leading experts on how to tackle food loss and waste holistically amid the pandemic on a global scale and in North America specifically. We will hear from FAO experts, ambassadors, policymakers, the private sector, and the two biggest food rescue and hunger relief organizations in the US and Canada. After welcoming remarks from Melinda Shiran, director of FAO North America, we are honored to hear from Ambassador Balefi how San Marino and Andorra played a key role in establishing an international day of awareness of food loss and waste. Rosa Rolle, who leads FAO's work on food loss and waste reduction, will present key recommendations for action based on a recently published policy brief. After this global perspective, we are honored to hear from a distinguished panel on the North American perspective. Before coming to the Q&A session answering questions from you, the audience, Karola Fabi will present FAO's new and innovative big data tool on food chains under the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the importance of data and information for evidence-based responses and policies. Without further ado, let me hand over to Melinda Shiran, director of the FAO liaison office for North America. Mr. Shiran brings with him more than two decades of national and international government leadership experience, focusing on rural development, agriculture, and food security issues. Melinda, over to you. Thanks Florian and hello everyone. While Florian was speaking, I just did a quick check on the registrants and found that over 700 people have registered and they're coming from all parts of the world and that clearly establishes the level of interest that we have in this topic across the globe. It's not surprising that though COVID-19 is primarily a health pandemic, it has in its aftermath left a global economy contracting by nearly 5% and many businesses, including those in food and agriculture sector, dodgering on the verge of collapse and closure. The pandemic's impact on food loss and food waste has been immense. Disrupted supply chains, closure, permanent or temporary food processing units, workers health, shrinking consumer demands have all had a deep impact on how agriculture food is being handled and consumed from farm to fork. What Florian was mentioning is not that these problems did not exist. They did. It's just that COVID-19 has exacerbated the situation and widened and exposed the chains in our armor to confront food loss and waste. In these welcome remarks, I would not like to take a deep dive into the issue. We have a galaxy of experts with us today to do so and present to you for your consideration, the policy implications and possible solutions to combat food loss and waste. However, I must take this opportunity to draw your attention to an excellent knowledge product which came out of FAO last year, the 2019 State of Food and Agriculture, so far as we know it. The publication from defining food loss and waste to helping us understand the varying impact of reducing food loss and waste along the value chain on food security and nutrition and or on greenhouse gas submission. The report is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the issue. The standardized methodology developed by FAO to measure food loss from production to retail level will go a long way in helping us assess our progress to SDG 12.3 which calls for halving global food loss and waste. I invite all of you to take a close look at SOFA 2019 and I think perhaps our communication team can put a link to that publication in the chat box for easy access. Excessive food loss and waste is completely unacceptable in a world where almost a billion people go hungry and the pressure on natural resources are increasing. Reducing food loss and waste is not only a moral imperative. It's also an economic and environmental one. In fact, it presents a logical and transformative opportunity to address major drivers of global environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. While simultaneously helping achieve food security and nutrition. I look forward to hearing a variety of perspectives from experts from FAO, food banks, private sector actors and others. On the issue including those of Congresswoman Pingri, Member of Congress from Maine and Co-Chair of the Food Recovery Caucus and His Excellency Ambassador Bellify, Permanent Rep of San Marino to the United Nations, USA and Canada. In December of 2019, led by San Marino and Andorra, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to designate 29 September as the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. Today we do not have the pleasure of hearing from her, but I must acknowledge the presence of Ambassador Balmana, Permanent Rep of Andorra to the UN at the webinar today. Ambassador Bellify is serving as a member of the Credential Committee of the 74th session of the General Assembly of the UN. And in the past has served as facilitator in the second committee for the resolution entitled International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, presented by San Marino and Andorra during the 74th session of the General Assembly of the UN. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to this event and to invite Ambassador Bellify to take the floor and offer his remarks. Ambassador the floor is yours. Good morning, thank you Director for your generous presentation. It's a pleasure for me to be here today. And first of all, let me congratulate you for organizing such an important event and also for inviting me to participate in this panel. I believe I'm here today to say something about the initiative carried out by San Marino together with Andorra, which broke to the adoption on November 2019 in the second committee of the General Assembly first and then in December of the same year in the plenary of the General Assembly of the resolution entitled International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. Let me start by explaining why it is important to speak about food loss and waste in the middle of a global health crisis. There are many countries that have been hit hard by the COVID-19 and that are suffering. There are also many countries that are now fighting against the negative consequences both socioeconomic and humanitarian of this pandemic. We are all together in this difficult and challenging time and what we need now is a strong spirit of solidarity, friendship among nations and let me say a very strong United Nations. Promoting the awareness of food loss and waste could help to mitigate the potential negative impact of food security and nutrition in this very complicated situation. San Marino and Andorra led a negotiation of the United Nations resolution which designated the 29th of September as International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste. This resolution received more than 60 cosponsor countries which has a very good sign of interest on this topic. The creation of an international day against food loss and waste could be the best occasion to sensitize the public opinion to the importance of the issue and be a catalytic factor for creating synergies at all levels. The resolution identifies the FAO as the leading agency for its implementation and stress the need that any action would have to be carried out in accordance with national priorities, which is a point very important. While 821 million people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition, about $1 trillion of food is lost or wasted every year. This is a paradox that we believe need to be addressed. So according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, reversing this trend would preserve enough food to feed 2 billion people. Global hunger isn't about a lack of food. The world produces enough food to nourish every man, woman and child on the planet. But nearly one third of all food produced each year is spendered or spoiled before it can be consumed. As we know, the SDG is Sustainable Development Goals. 12 among its objectives includes to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level and reduce food losses along production and supply chains by 2030. Last summer, San Marino organized an event at the UN together with the European Union and Andorra and many other cosponsors in order to promote an international response on this topic. And following the discussion of this event, we thought that it was extremely important to establish an international day of awareness, food loss and waste, to create a momentum for an international joint effort. In this regard, it is fundamental that governments, private sector NGOs continue to work together to raise awareness of the value of food on the serious risks of food waste and actively involving citizens in the promotion of sustainable development models. The republics of San Marino takes food loss and waste very seriously. I believe I have no time in this presentation to describe the initiatives carry out in San Marino this topic in the recent years. We are now discussing in San Marino various projects to implement on the occasion of the celebration of the International Benefit. One of these initiatives is, for example, an issue of a postage stamp to celebrate International Day. I would like to conclude this presentation by saying that we are leaving a crisis, a kind of tragedy that hit every country in one way or another, every citizen of the world. Building back better from COVID-19 offer us the unique opportunity for pursuing a transformative recovery, which brings us to be more inclusive and more sustainable development societies where no one will be left behind. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ambassador Belefi. And thank you also again to Ambassador Vives Balmania of Andorra for your important leadership in passing this resolution. So, could you let us know what led San Marino and Andorra to lead this very important international process? Okay, as I try to also cover this question in my presentation, we understood that we need at some point to join Air Force for an international response, because the paradox that we have in front of us is that we have enough food to nourish every man, but at the same time, the waste of food and the loss of food is so much that will create this paradox so that we have enough food, but we can use it because we squander, we exploit, it simply is lost and wasted. One trillion of food is wasted or lost every year. So, this is a kind of problem that cannot be solved just by a single, one country. We need to join our effort and work together in order to address problems like this. That means that we have to strengthen and we have to renew an international cooperation on this, on this, on this topic. One of the things that was important for us to do is before to raise awareness on this topic and the idea to present a resolution in order to establish an international day of awareness food was lost and wasted was important for us. At the same time, it was a kind of a coincidence of the testing. We knew that we went to the Office of FAO to present this resolution. We discovered that FAO last year during the month of June, if I'm not mistaken, the director was correct me if I'm mistaken. Adopted a resolution asking the secretary general to establish to our resolution international day of this topic. So, we had the Andorel San Marino and FAO more or less in the same time, the SEMA idea. So the process that we started there was supported strongly by the FAO. And thanks to the FAO, we also, we'd be able to have a very important and strong resolution. That's the reason why we, we, we succeed those. Excellent. Thank you so much, Ambassador. And indeed, congratulations again for the passing of the resolution, and which is of utmost importance, not only to FAO, but really to the whole global community in its effort to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We encourage all of you participants to observe the first ever international day of awareness on food loss and waste this 29th of September, and we encourage you to use the remaining three months to think about your own campaigns and events on this important location. Where we work, where we shop, where we eat and what we eat has changed during the pandemic. Between lockdowns, travel restrictions, reduced air freight, consumer panic buying and abruptly lacking demand from restaurants, schools and other institutional buyers. Food supply chains have seen dramatic disruptions and require new and creative ways to avoid that food is being lost or wasted. We will hear more about this topic from Rosa Rolland, who is a Senior Enterprise Development Officer in FAO's Nutrition and Food Systems Division, where she leads a team working on food loss and waste reduction. Her almost 25 years career in FAO includes seven years at the regional office for Asia and Pacific. Rosa holds a PhD in food science from Ohio State University in the United States. Dear Rosa, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Good day, good evening everyone. My presentation today is titled and focused on mitigating risks to food systems during COVID-19, reducing food loss and waste. Much of what I will present is actually based on the compilation and analysis of a number of reports, news and media reports. Now, as was highlighted by Ambassador Belfair, the coronavirus pandemic has really highlighted to us a number of weaknesses in our food systems. Food supply chains across the globe have been disrupted by blockages in transport routes, transport restrictions, and also quarantine measures during a number of lockdowns that have taken place globally. And this has also resulted in significant increases in food loss and waste, especially of perishable produce such as fruits and vegetables, fresh meat and dairy products. And then the traditional supply chains of fruits and vegetables in most developing countries have been very strongly impacted and threatened in the food security in many of these countries in both the rural and the urban sectors. Now, when we look at this chart, what I would like to highlight to you is the differences between the different generalized characteristics of the traditional supply chains, which are those chains that feed mass markets in the developing world and they predominate versus the modern systems which would be what we characterize as a value chain that is very well equipped with the technology and the logistics systems to support and facilitate access to higher markets as well as to trade. Whereas if you look at the green column, what you have here, a number of production driven trade chains with stakeholders who often lack technical capacity, knowledge, and also they have limited competitive organizational organizational capacities or capital to invest in new technologies to be able to upgrade their practices. The levels of these losses in these chains can go as high on the normal circumstances before pre COVID, for example, up to 50%. And nevertheless, as we say as I've highlighted, the bulk of the food supply action in many developing countries is based on these types categories of traditional supply chains. I have to move my slide. Okay, so this slide is intended to provide some perspective on the some of the actions and the technologies that I'm talking about when I refer to these supply chains. Because FAO has done a lot of people and that's one of the main target groups that we work with in many of our in many of the countries that we support to look at the critical loss points in these traditional supply chains. And indeed, we consistently see transport systems as a critical loss point in fruit and vegetable supply chains with inadequate and poor packaging as a major underlying cause. But when you look more closely at the various actions that are taking place in these supply chains, you see that the manual holding of produce, the guy with the basket on his back, why? Because there's a lack of infrastructure, feeder roads to connect the farms, especially in mountainous areas to major roads. You also see the number of times that produce has to change hands before it actually gets to a market. Every time it has to change hands and it handle what happens, you have quality loss. And then when it gets to the market, it's packaged in the single use plastic bags where you have again unsustainable practice environmental practice where you have a lot of sweating, accelerating rate of decay and spoilage. And also, if you look at the number, take note of the number of individuals that are involved in the different steps of every supply chain. With COVID, what we see, which we have seen is shortages in labor. Shortages in labor in the supply chains of this type have resulted in food being left unhavocated in the fields and also increase the transit times between the farm and the market in many of these traditional supply chains. The transit time under ambient conditions is 24 to 48 hours. But now the average in three even up to five days and the lack of working capital affordable inputs and difficulties in sourcing inputs is also a major issue that is resulting in really low quality crop outputs in a number of countries. Also, with a number of international border, border closures coupled with national and some national lockdowns, trade in agriculture produce and related value chains has significantly reduced a cascading backward impact. And that goes all the way to the farm gate level with adverse effects on the small scale processors as well as on the incomes, the livelihoods of small holders and of course, high levels of food loss. When you look at what is happening on the demand side, the onset of the pandemic, I can't get those slides to change here, has changed a lot of the food consumption habits in many developing countries. What we have seen across a lot of the literature is a number of people opt in now to eat more processed foods, there's less shopping in markets and over time what we have also begun to see is that there is reduced purchasing in markets or into poor quality, but also because of reduced consumer access to income. And so therefore, needless to say that in order to avert food crisis, government attention is consistently now an increasingly focused in countries on addressing food security issues to ensure and then to also to ensure health and income opportunities to be able to provide make available fresh foods that are safe and accessible and nutritious to consumers. So what I have, what I have done is to look at some of the policy issues and some of the policy responses to curb these losses in the traditional supply chains. What I'm trying to do is to actually highlight some of those examples that are actually being implemented where we have actually had the chance to interface with the some some of the stakeholders implementing this policy actions, but also areas that we feel could be better addressed. Many countries have begun to implement a number of strategic measures and interventions to strike a balance in terms of focusing on health, while keeping those critical supply chains operational. In some cases, we have seen, for example, the provision of education materials to vendors and consumers in other cases, again, we're not talking a very high literate, highly literate audience. So the awareness raising campaigns being implemented in markets through farm or field schools through the active community groups like the Dimitri groups that have been formed in countries, as well as through community radio. There are a number of mitigation measures that have been put in place in markets, for example, the provision of facilities to facilitate better hygiene. And also, to a large extent, FAO in a number of countries is actually facilitating the whole issue of addressing this awareness, these types of awareness campaigns to a large extent also through some of its farm or field schools. Next slide. Okay, to assure continued production and to maintain produce quality in in French markets, the policy response has been to make available loans to be able to support and facilitate access to inputs. Because this has been a major problem, the issue of poor output quality in at the field production level. There's also a number of initiatives across many countries to provide subsidies for the procurement of key inputs. In some cases, governments have been distributing seeds and not only in rural areas but also in urban centers to help people to have access to food and to maintain your food security. Countries are also facilitating input and movement of seed and fertilizers within countries and putting in place systems to facilitate the mobility of seasonal workers and these seasonal workers are working all across the globe. You see time and again these types of systems and are being put in place to ensure continuity. Next slide please. So to address loss during handling storage and distribution, we have seen a number of countries putting in place systems through development of transport apps to facilitate logistical arrangements for food distribution. And many of these are being developed through public and private partnerships. In some cases, these partnerships also support some of these through public sector arrangements, some of these types of initiatives to be able to distribute food that is produced as widely as possible. Governments are also investing in building collection centers as a base to facilitate e-commerce and we have also seen in countries a shift also toward the decentralization of cool storage facilities. But we still see the need and scope for increasing investment in bulk packaging to really to better manage the quality of produce and also to enhance environmental sustainability in terms of the initiatives and activities that are ongoing. Next slide please. Governments are also increasingly facilitating the development of e-commerce through training to help small holders and businesses in the local marketing of produce and traditional supply chains and particularly in the Asian region this has been taking place as early as much of this year. And in the African region you see a number of young people, the youth are taking up these types of initiatives. Large exporters are also making use of e-commerce in local markets in the case of for example Kenya where they have actually begun to do a lot of their own private public, their only private partnerships to facilitate that. And also targeting alternative marketing opportunities, for example using mom and pop shops for example to market the produce that they would normally have had to export. Exporter collaboration is also promoted among producers in a number of countries to maximize the use of air freight. And then FAO is doing its part by contributing also to training and capacity development to support identification of market opportunities as well as good course harvest practice. Next slide please. As I highlighted earlier on the demand side issues, there is an increase in demand and consumption of processed foods in a number of the developing countries. And therefore what is now being taken place is the provision of grants to incentivize small holder value addition of perishables to reduce the levels of loss and waste. We still see the need for greater support and attention to investment for example in on-farm processing through for example retractable mobile facilities as well as to training in simple processing technologies that could be taken up by households and small groups of women to help to assure their food security. And FAO is also supporting some of these types of works through projects in some of the regions. There's also the need for the stockpiling of food of extended shelf life. I learned for example through this media discussion that in the government of the Philippines for example has been during this crisis been providing ready to eat meals to the some of the forest of the poor. So now I'd like to look at the issue of food waste. And what we have seen is the shortage. Next slide please. Of seasonal labor has resulted in considerable risk in the upstream segments of the food supply chains particularly at the during the early stages of the pandemic. And this has been the development and use of a number of supply chain innovations in a number of private entities such as the use of automation sensors robotics blockchain technologies as well as innovative process processing technologies In the downstream segments of the supply chains countries have witnessed an exponential increase in demand for the services of food banks and food recovery and redistribution initiatives. And coupled with this increase many challenges and complications are also being faced by food banks and several of them have also encountered situations where they have had to temporarily close their doors and have faced reductions of volunteers as well as donations because of the volume the rapid rate of increase policies to reduce upstream the upstream risks have focused on the incentivizing developing incentives to to ease some of the important export activities and also to ensure the continuity of production so that there is a consistent supply of fresh foods fresh fruits and vegetables going into the different streams. The promotion of alternative processing options is another issue that is constantly being discussed by many countries for example freezing rapid freezing of fruits and vegetables and that is happening apparently quite a bit now in the Asian context as well as helping to develop linkages between producers and food banks to maximize the use of the food that is produced fruits and vegetables Policy responses to support food banks have focused on increased support to for example policies excuse me policy responses have focused on increased support to food banks charities and also to assistance and support to a number of nutrition programs that address the use and women in particular the very vulnerable people and then also there's been a number of efforts to focus on educating manufacturers and consumers and retailers to really understand and apply the best before and use by dates appropriately in order to maximize the use of food and food and redistribution efforts because quite often even consumers are also being targeted for this because quite often a lot of food in Europe for example currently before sorry before the pandemic you had up to 10% of food that was purchased by consumers being thrown away because of a lack of understanding of these issues. So the next slide please to summarize while to a large extent my presentation has highlighted areas for government support for and private public partnerships. We believe that collective efforts and innovative partnerships among a broad spectrum of stakeholders of coming from different segments and different sectors will have a significant impact in maximizing the use of food that we produce in ensuring food security for all and really to having an impact on reducing the high levels of food loss and waste that we have to now deal with because of the COVID pandemic and this concludes my presentation I thank you for your attention. Thank you so much Rosa for your presentation and it's indeed a daunting task to grasp everything that's going on around the globe which is FAO's mandate. And thank you Rosa for reminding us that there's a difference between traditional and modern supply chains and that while developing countries often face bigger problems and food loss developed countries often face bigger issues in food waste. So thank you very much for the presentation if you have questions for Rosa make sure to post them in the Q&A box and we will try to get to them during the Q&A session. We will now move from a global perspective to North America and focus on the U.S. and Canada and we are honored to have with us a distinguished panel on the North American perspective featuring Congresswoman Shelly Pingree, Megan Stess from the Consumer Brands Association and the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, Blake Thompson from Freedom America and Laurie Nicholl from Second Harvest Canada. We are really looking forward to your insights and learning how COVID-19 has impacted your important work on food recovery and hunger relief and which solutions you are championing. We will start with remarks from Representative Shelly Pingree, Member of Congress for the First District of Maine and Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Food Recovery Caucus. As many of you might or might not know, Shelly Pingree actually is a farmer herself and started as an organic farmer on the small island of North Haven, Maine in the 1970s. In Congress, Shelly realized on her experience as a certified organic farmer to support the diverse range of American agriculture, including sustainable organic and locally focused farming. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee and the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, she has been vocal advocate for food policy reform. Pingree has pioneered legislation to reduce food waste across the American food system and as the founder and chair of the Food Recovery Caucus. Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining us today. You have the floor. Great. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to share this time with you today and for you to gather all the speakers and participants together. I have enjoyed listening to the previous speakers and I think that if we just adopted the FAO guidelines, thank you very much, Rosa. We would be all set in the United States as well as anywhere in the world. But I'm looking forward to hearing from all of you and many of the things that you are talking about and suggesting today and I will just give you a little bit of an update of where we are in the United States in a time that is extremely complicated for this issue and so many others. I have actually been working on the issue of food waste for quite a long time and I have to say that this moment in time has brought a new level of attention as all of you know, while we're dealing with the global pandemic, but bringing that back to the United States for many people it's the first time they have ever gone to the grocery store and seen empty shelves. And they're also witnessing a whole variety of other experiences, whether it's long lines at the food bank or the situation that many American farmers are in today that have brought attention to this in a way we never could as a public policy discussion. That's given us a lot of opportunity I think to look for solutions and talk about how to fix these problems at a difficult time. We, as I mentioned have been working on this issue for a few years I'm the co-chair of a bipartisan food waste caucus. I co-chair it with Representative Newhouse from the other coast in Washington State. And this has been a goal that we've had we've had the caucus since 2018 and the USDA has been working on some of these important guidelines to reduce food waste since 2015 so it's not new to us. Several of the ideas you've been already discussing today are parts of pieces of legislation that I have sponsored. I originally did a very comprehensive one called the Food Recovery Act and of course we're happy to share any of these details with anyone or they're available also on our website. But that's a very comprehensive piece of legislation to talk about everything that goes wrong in the system and how to deal with it, everything from making donations easier for retailers to addressing the very important issue that was just mentioned that's the Food Labeling Act we understand that one of the most important things we could do for consumers is having uniformity of those labels and we've made a lot of progress in working on those issues so it's just perfectly clear to people when you should throw away food and when you shouldn't. We have a proposal to do much more with food waste issues in the schools because we believe that you know the younger you start to understand why it's not good to throw away food what happens to it the environmental impacts. What it is when people don't have access to food when they're going hungry every day. So that's grants and technical assistance to schools again everything from helping students to be better engaged in the process to starting composting facilities and schools for that food that can't be used. I also this year have introduced the agricultural resiliency act which incorporates many of these things that we're talking about today and sets a goal of reducing food waste by 75% by 2030 so we're anxious to move forward to get this done. And that act is really speaking to the issues around climate change how we have our farmers and those in the food supply system much more engaged in the issues related to food waste as well as the issues around carbon sequestration the soil and the overall challenges of agriculture and climate change that we're dealing with today. So as I mentioned we we with the USDA and with our colleagues in Congress have been working on this it's actually in spite of the contention we often have in Congress it's a very bipartisan issue. I think that everybody's grandmother told them not to waste food and people when they hear these statistics that 30 to 50% of our food is wasted they start to understand that this is a serious issue particularly when you have people going hungry and when you're facing the environmental and resource challenges that we have today. So let me just fast forward a bit to the crisis that we're in today as I said we've we've laid a lot of groundwork on this and done a lot of background but today in the midst of this pandemic people are really seeing in a very different way the challenges with our supply chains and the challenges here in the wealthiest country in the world where we have an abundance of food but it often doesn't get to the people who need it. Once again we've we've had the chance for people to go into a grocery store for the first time and seen empty shelves to have concerns about whether or not it's okay to eat certain foods or pick up the produce what are the safety issues around eating food. At the same time they're watching television footage of farmers who are plowing under you know hundreds of acres of vegetables that were produced at the wrong time or produced for a different segment of the supply chain and can't get to the place where it needs to be. The tremendous challenges we've had around animal slaughter due to the pandemic in our enormous slaughterhouses in this country and our vertically integrated system and very consolidated system and then we have farmers who because of our precise system of agriculture to serve this just in time supply chain when the hog is ready to go to the slaughterhouse if it's not there's not the capacity because it's shut down or are working at a different rate. Many have had to been slaughtered and not even been able to get to someone who needs the food and is hungry and at the same time you can turn on your TV in America and see cars lined up. You know for a very long way of people who have never been to food banks before we've never had to access this kind of food assistance now being in this time of need but not being able to access the food that is literally going to waste in the field. And creating a whole nother host of challenges for us. We've put some funding levels into some of our earlier packages to deal with the fund pandemic trying to increase availability of food through school meal programs to our snap assistance program. The USDA has created food boxes which attempt to access some of this food from a variety of suppliers and get them directly to people. Some of those issues we agree some of those solutions we agree with some of them that we don't and we are proposing a different way of looking at this and a chance to open up looking at our entire supply chain which is deeply connected to this issue of food waste and so just a couple of things about that. I won't go into our whole comprehensive look about it but we've been continuing to make suggestions and are looking for ways to use this crisis to reform some of the things in our system. We see a huge opportunity now to have much more support for local and regional agriculture. It's been an issue we've been working on for a long time but particularly in this moment in time where our supply system has failed us and some of our consolidated systems have failed us. People have found that they can go in their community down the road and they can sign up for a CSA which is a way to access food or they can buy from their local farmer or they can even shop online and have a delivery made to their house in ways that we never access this technology before. It's a great way to support more local and regional agriculture and get away from some of the problems that we have of food waste in our very consolidated systems. We now see a need for many of the things that were discussed earlier and that's the shortage of infrastructure. I've worked on for many years the attempt to get more capacity in our local and small slaughterhouses because people are more and more interested in buying locally raised meat or having access to that but there's often not the infrastructure capacity so mobile slaughterhouses, more aid for small slaughterhouses, also in other kinds of processing. It was just mentioned in the FAO suggestions that we need a lot more infrastructure around fast freezing or processing food when we have too much of it but it has to be more local and regionalized because we're not going to continually have the ability to have big farms that shipped to one centralized freezer packing facility or canning facility so we are looking at a whole variety of those things and again have renewed interest in a way I've never seen before and while it's a sad reference to a huge challenge that we're facing today it does force people to look at this supply chain that's been some of it directed strictly to restaurants and food service which many of which are closed today and some of which going directly to consumers, a change in interest of people wanting to buy more locally, a huge opportunities for our farmers to have these markets and to reduce that waste that we're seeing today. In the long run in conclusion, this is just critically important as previous speakers have mentioned we are plowing so many resources into growing food in America today and that is water, that is labor, things that we will not have at the scale that we've had in the past, our labor shortages are huge protecting people who work in farm labor or food processing labor is getting increasingly important as we look out into the future and also have to address issues around climate change and limited supplies of things like water we cannot keep over processing food and not getting it to the people who need this is an environmental problem as we all know food waste turns into methane gas and become some of the more toxic issues that we're dealing with in the environment and as somebody mentioned earlier it's just a moral issue we cannot have so many people going hungry whether it's in the United States or around the world when we are literally dumping and destroying food because we cannot design a system that's appropriate to use so I look forward to working with all of you I think we're going to have much greater opportunities in the United States to revise and change some of these things in our system and you know as has been observed far from being a leader right now in fixing the problem we are suffering from many of the challenges the countries around the world are experiencing right now and that will give us only greater emphasis to fix those problems and to work both on a national and international level so again thank you so much for letting me join you thank you to everybody who's you know on this today and speaking about this and working on this I think we have to all pull together and work together to solve one of our biggest challenges today Indeed thank you so much congresswoman Pingree and thank you for your inspiring words and also reminding us that this is an opportunity to tackle this issue raise public awareness that this is an environmental issue which should not forget the environmental dimension of food loss and waste and also that we have to look at the whole system so thank you so much for your important work and your inspiring remarks we will now move to an interactive panel we will hear first a private sector perspective followed then by the two biggest food recovery organizations in the USA and Canada we excited to hear from Megan Stas who's the vice president of packaging and sustainability at the consumer brands association she joined the association in 2010 and has over 15 years of experience in the environmental sustainability field at the consumer brands association Stas works on issues such as recycling waste sourcing supply chain sustainability and other topics that pertain to the consumer packaged goods industry among other initiatives she's leading the national effort to address the broken recycling system she also leads the food waste reduction alliance a cross industry initiative to reduce food waste central landfills and increase food donations to food banks in the United States thank you so much for being with us Megan the first question to you would be as consumer brands association you represent companies which produce most shelf stable goods and grocery stores what are some of the main COVID-19 impacts you have seen in your part of the private sector thank you Florian and thank you for having me to the whole FAO team I think this has been such an interesting conversation already and then such a critical issue so I really welcome the opportunity to participate today my Megan Stas as Florian said I have two roles one is leading sustainability for the consumer brands association consumer brands used to be a group called the grocery manufacturers association some of you might have heard of us then but consumer brands represents the leading food beverage and consumer products companies in the US so our members are companies like PepsiCo Coca-Cola General Mills Procter & Gamble Clorox companies like that and then as part of our work we also co-lead a major project on food waste called the food waste reduction alliance and as Florian said that's a cross industry partnership between our organization the national restaurant association and then a group called FMI which represents the leading grocery stores so the three associations together run FWRA the food waste reduction alliance and we work on food waste issues in the supply chain and food donation it's also worth mentioning that I also live in Maine and Congressman Pingree is my representative from Congress so you guys get a great Maine perspective today on this webinar like it or not but we've been working with her office for a number of years on these issues and really commend her leadership so to get to your to your question Florian I think we've seen you know we as an industry have been working on food waste and food waste reduction in our operations and increasing food donation for the past 10 years we started the food waste reduction alliance back in 2011 understanding just how critical these issues are to consumers and to the environment and business what we have seen with the COVID pandemic is an unprecedented disruption in our entire supply chain and in our entire lives we have seen tremendous changes not just in where consumers get their food and where they consume their food right so grocery stores were shut down restaurants were shut down you know people changed where they could get their groceries how often but we also saw a change in what consumers were getting right as the Congressman was mentioning you know for the first time many Americans were seeing stock outs when unavailability of product on shelves and so as we look at this supply chain and these tremendous disruptions I think we we have a lot of really great lessons to learn and also a lot of really great examples of how innovation and collaboration and quick thinking frankly across the supply chain can keep those critical infrastructure that critical food system running and getting it to to to all kinds of consumers but especially those in need I think that the disruptions that that the congressman mentioned of seeing products getting cloud under at the farm level or farm animals going to waste and then you know huge long hours lines at food banks here in the in the U.S. they were heartbreaking stories and I think we've seen some great innovation in recognizing those breaks in the supply chain and finding ways ways to fix them so the major impacts of COVID that we have seen from a food waste perspective were really around such a disruption in where consumers are getting their food but then also what they're getting in terms of reduced you know in terms of perishable food not being available changing their purchasing habits in terms of buying maybe more shelf stable food and the like and so it's been a it's been a very interesting journey and I think we've got some great examples to share on the panel today from an innovation perspective. Perfect thank you so much and you already mentioned the food waste reduction alliance so what new challenges and also opportunities do you see for food recovery in the current pandemic. Yeah, I think that's a really good one. The reason that we launched the food waste reduction alliance back in 2011 is because we recognize not just the importance of food waste reduction and food donation, but also the critical nature of collaboration. What we recognize is that food waste happens all along the supply chain. And so it's going to take all of the partners in the supply chain to reduce food waste in our operations and make sure that we're getting food to those in need. So I think one of the things that we have done very well through the food waste reduction alliance is those ideas around cooperation and collaboration, but I think especially with the coded pandemic it's what can we do, do more up. And just last year, for example, the food waste reduction alliance signed memorandum of understanding and agreement with three federal agencies here in the US with the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to collaborate and work together around food waste issues, but especially around ways raising awareness, strengthening understanding of liability protections for those who donate food, and finding ways to get more infrastructure options in different parts of the United States, so that when we do have food waste, it's not going to landfill itself, it's going to compost or it's going to make energy. So those kinds of partnerships I think are really critical. And one of the things that we saw during the COVID pandemic, I think was an unprecedented amount of partnerships and eagerness to engage through FWRA and others. So the American Trucking Association, for example, launched a really tremendous initiative to pull together a broad group of stakeholders to provide a forum for all sorts of partners throughout the supply chain to identify solutions or ideas that they might have to solve some of these immediate supply chain disruptions that we were seeing. And now that the pandemic and the supply chains have started to get to a more normal or a little bit calmer state, the Trucking Association is looking at building out some work on how can we learn from this? How can we make our supply chain more resilient so that if there are shocks like this in the future, that we as the full food and beverage and retail and restaurant supply chain, how can we make sure that we don't see those major disruptions again? So I think again that collaboration, cross-industry partnership, it's so critical to our work here. Thank you so much, indeed. If food loss and waste is really a multi-sector issue, it needs multi-sector action. Now with the crisis, there seems to be an increased use of food packaging, single use plastics, which often ends up in landfills, soils and oceans about which many consumers are concerned about. What role do you see for more sustainable packaging and recycling systems? Yeah, I think if COVID taught us anything, it is that there is a need for all different kinds of packaging and products, and also a need for recycling systems that can handle that packaging and those products. Packaging plays this really critical role in getting food to consumers safely and with quality intact. And especially during the COVID pandemic, the safety of food and food packaging was really on full display. As consumers use more food at home, especially more packaged food at home, it's really clear that we need a recycling system throughout the U.S. and certainly around the world that can handle that packaging, that can use that packaging to make it back into packaging, make it into another product, and absolutely keep it not only out of landfills, but out of the environment. So I think there's a role to play for this kind of packaging, especially from a food safety and quality standpoint, and especially as we think about supply chain disruptions and resiliency of the supply chain. But we also have to have a resilient recycling system and waste system that can handle and process that. Excellent. Thank you so much. My last question to you is, what is the key lesson learned from this pandemic and what would be your call for action? I think it's really resiliency and creativity. As we have looked at some of the actions that were taken, even just by my member companies, I think we've seen just some tremendous innovation and a commitment to doing the right thing. We know that General Mills, for example, repurposed one of their lines of operation and did a whole run of $5 million worth of food that they produced and sent directly to donation. And that was shelf-stable product like granola bars, frozen breakfast items, cereals. We know that Kellogg has given $7.5 million in food and funds for food donation. Pepsico has donated over 50 million meals. And we've really seen some creative repurposing of supply chains or maybe parts of supply chains or operational lines or companies really stepping up creatively to do their part. But I think the call to action here is, how can we look at these that are supply chains holistically? How can we look at these challenges from a resiliency standpoint and try to take some of the lessons learned that we've learned and make sure that we're applying them to the supply chains of the future? Perfect. Thank you so much. If you have further questions for Megan, please put them in the chat box and we will try to address them in the Q&A session. Our next speaker is Blake Thompson, who is Chief Supply Chain Officer at Feeding America. Blake has built a long career in the food industry and has extensive end-to-end supply chain experience. He has had responsibility for every function of the supply chain, including demand planning and management, sourcing, procurement, transportation and logistics, technology and production, research, development, quality and safety. Thank you so much for being with us, Blake. As Chief Supply Chain Officer, you're responsible to increase the amount of nutritious food available through the immense Feeding America Network with over 200 food banks for people facing hunger. What are some of the impacts you are seeing in supply chains and food donations? Glad to be here. I appreciate the invitation to attend this forum and I think it's great work and I've been with Feeding America for almost two years. And this is my first entry into a not-for-profit charitable food that's been interesting to your question on what we've seen with donations. At the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a huge run on retail grocery items. Megan pointed those out, created a huge demand and reduced supply. One of our largest donation streams for our organization is retail food. And that put a very hard decline in some of those food streams that we were realizing prior to COVID. The impacts extended all the way into the manufacturing arena in the retail segment. It forced our network to begin to purchase more shelf-stable food to fill the gaps in the declining channel. We're still purchasing at a higher level of shelf-stable food as the supply is constrained and this is not a financially sustainable way of supporting food, charitable food for our system. But as Megan pointed out, schools and restaurants and places of work were shutting down. We saw the food service industry see a very significant decline in their business, which caused inventories to back up through their supply chain. We were very fortunate to get a lot of donations early on as the response to COVID occurred from local distribution centers at food service companies. Mostly it was the perishable foods, so the dairy protein and produce items were very plentiful at the very beginning of COVID through the food service channel. We've also seen an increase in our availability of really protein and dairy and produce. That's been our primary go-to foods as we've tried to make up some of the other channel declines that we've seen. They've been available and however a lot of the food service product is not conducive to distribution in the charitable food system. So we've acquired as much of that food as we can and our food banks are just not in a position to be able to repackage that food in distributive format. So that's another obstruction within the supply chain of being able to get food that's available from source to where food may be needed through the charitable food system. The increase on the food service side is not fully filled the gap of the retail food decline that we've seen and more of our efforts have been around the produce and dairy items that have more abundance and more applicability to our system. Excellent, thank you so much. So we've talked a little bit about the supply side. Could you let us know on the demand side, what are some shifts in demand you're seeing in your networks and what are some of the biggest challenges facing food banks in the US at the moment? So not only have our food banks been challenged with increasing demand, we've seen about a 60% increase for demand at our network food banks for charitable food. Some of that demand is coming from, we're also pointed it out, people that have not used the charitable food system in the past. So there's a new entry into this need. We've seen the increase in demand at the same time, we've been impacted with a decline in volunteers. So the issues are around social distancing and protecting our food bank employees, agency employees, volunteers, and also our clients have forced us to look at some very creative different ways from a distribution standpoint for the food. So demand has gone up. The distribution challenges have been increased as well. Our network reports that about 20% of our feeding agencies, partner agencies, have closed or diminished reduce their operations as well. So that's required some different ways of thinking about how we distribute food. And the requirements around zero touch, or no touch as well, have been impacted with our operations for distribution. So we, it varies in our system, but we have food banks that have access to a lot of food. They have distribution limitations to distribute that food. In other areas we have more distribution capacity and less food to serve those in need today. One of the items it's, it's, it's kind of risen to the top as a very significant innovation in terms of being able to distribute more food has been these food pre pre prepared food boxes. So we have, we also within the food banks have have have been preparing food boxes with as much shelf stable food as we can acquire but we've also been afforded food boxes through the USDA, the CFAT program that started in June. And those are primarily been around produce, dairy and protein items in those food boxes and those we've seen, we've seen millions of those boxes since, since June. Excellent. Thank you so much. And for the important work you do. What would you say what is your key lesson you've learned from the pandemic and what would be your call for action. So this, I think we need to understand the scale of the problem I think most, most do that this is huge food waste, and also the need for charitable food. Our food bank system, although it's huge will recover and distribute close to 6 billion pounds this year across the United States. We're only part of the solution of this problem. And I think representative Pingree, called it out perfectly is, this is, this is an issue of overproduction. And it's also an issue of for food banks, getting access to more affordable food, and also having to overcome so far distribution challenges with infrastructure, whether it's cold chain trucks. But more distribution capability to serve more food for those in need. Excellent. Thank you so much, Blake. If you as audience have further questions to Blake, make sure to put them in the Q amp a box addressing them mentioning to whom you address the question and please stating your name and affiliation. We will now move to Canada and hear from Laurie nickel, CEO of Canada's leading food rescue organization. And as a parent who suffered from food insecurity, Laurie is acutely aware of the impact of food access and healthy food for people. advocacy around universal child nutrition has resulted in millions of funding dollars directed to student nutrition. And through a community development model, the leadership has changed the way Canada manages food loss and waste as CEO of second harvest. She saw an opportunity to private a local food charity that distributes fresh healthy food into a national food network. And food recovery, her initiative and collaborative approach on food recovery includes both logistical and technical approaches to ensure that local communities needs are met. She created the national food sharing mobile app food rescue dot ca, which is changing the way charities access food from coast to coast to mitigate the detrimental impacts of COVID-19 on food insecure people. She immediately built a Canadian national task force with government and industry leaders to ensure supply could meet demand without over saturating the charity bill sector with one commodity. And thank you so much for being with us today, Laurie. My first question, our first question to you would be, could you tell us more about the situation in Canada, and which COVID-19 impacts you are seeing as Canada's biggest food rescue organization. Well, thanks so much first for having Canada on the panel. We're just delighted to be here so gay. So COVID-19 hit us pretty hard and pretty fast as it did everybody. We pretty much shut down the middle of March. And that really impacted not just the food system, but the charitable sector. So for our organization immediately we went with safety first obviously as everybody did. Make sure that our staff had the appropriate PPE we understood what physical distancing was we stopped having volunteers immediately. And all of our office staff went home, and we started working from home. And that was really we want to role model that to all the organizations that we support of which there are many, many of them. Second Harvest is unique in that we, we are 90% perishable, and we don't purchase any food. It's all food rescue. And that means we have a logistics system in place, but not a huge one all over the country. And from the food services stopping immediately our hotels, our restaurants, everything was closed. It really increased the amount of surplus food that was available, but also in a way that was difficult to manage for families because there were large packages. So we had to figure out a way of managing that in the best way. We also had meal programs that shut down. And so what happens to those community dining places they shut down the homeless shelter still need food. We were fortunate in that the philanthropic sector the corporate sector really got behind food during the beginning of the pandemic and continue to do so. And so Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment started they turned their, they turned the NBA basketball court into a meal production site, producing I think half a million meals to date, and they're individually packaged to ensure that they're kind of grab and go, the whole charity sector changed in an instant. So much of it is supported by our seniors population, and our seniors were told to go home because this with they had compromised immune systems and this was a demographic that really should not be out in public. Many of the organizations just stopped and many other ones just kind of popped up to so it was a whole logistical change to how do we manage all these new places and and second harvest we're not membership based we are opt in. We have food, we've done the research in Canada, 58% of all the food we produce is lost or wasted. There's more than enough food to feed everybody. So let's make sure that they can have it. COVID has changed this also in terms of we're a big country with not very many people. So just getting food from certain areas like from the south of Canada, when most of our populations on the south to the north of Canada has required a really significant infrastructure change. And that means trucking food up to northern parts of Ontario and then having planes fly them into flying communities. And really, I think what that did with COVID really showed us a disparity between rich and poor in a way that Canadians I don't believe had seen it before. It was the first time that people with money I think felt hunger because they went to their grocery store and said, Oh my goodness, there's nothing on the shelves. And that was the first time they kind of could identify with it. And so I think a lot of that has, has really just changed and open a lot of Canadians eyes to the reality of the hunger that is in developed country a wonderful country, but it exists. The response has been swift. And we are doing the best we can with all the support that we're getting and it's been incredible, I think, how we've managed. Thank you so much for these insights. I'm going to showcase holistic approaches will use food loss and waste and food insecurity at the same time admit epidemic. So could you tell us more about the collaborative approach your champion in Canada, and how you coordinate with civil society government private sector and even indigenous people I read. How did you do that. And finally we recognize that we needed to collaborate the only way that we're all going to change the world is together. And we know that. And so on March 18 we created, we're a bit behind Megan, sorry Megan I'm so happy to hear this so we created a national task force. It was a food rescue Canadian Alliance national task force. And that got charities, big charities national regional United Ways Red Cross food banks. Industry that was retail to farm commodities, and together in a room to really understand where the spikes and food are, and where the gaps and so that we could connect the dots on that. We also did that with the federal government, they were part of the committee of the task force, agriculture, agriculture Canada, and we had an indigenous working group as well, because we have communities that people are often overlook and second harvest always to leave no one behind, like there are an urban centers are often a fair amount of support, but in those more rural remote settings. How can we ensure that food gets to those communities. And so what we found was a lot of people wanted to help. So even getting into the north, instead of creating new systems. How can we piggyback on existing ones. And so we worked with northern stores to allocate funding and food to make sure that they could have it in the south. We worked with all the charities, all industry farm manufacturer processors, you name it government regional municipal. We all got together to make sure that we could ensure all of this surplus food of which there is has already been a significant amount and it's only increased could get out before it got into landfill, because second harvest first we're no waste, no hunger we really see the environmental imperative of keeping food out of landfill. And we want to make sure people access that food. And so we can only do that through collaboration. And that's what we continue to do. Indeed, could you briefly tell us about the road you see for digital innovation, especially under the current pandemic. Well, I think there's a rule for all kinds of innovation. We're fortunate I feel like some of the things we did it's almost as though we knew this was coming. We created an online platform and a mobile app called food rescue dot CA again an opt in system for food businesses, and for charities and nonprofits that they opt in. If you need food. It's there, we already know it was there. We already and we had already just completed a mapping of all the charities and nonprofits across Canada, which have not been done before to learn that there are 60,000 of them. There are 50,000 places we have 58% of all the food that is lost and wasted. Let's use a system that will map those on top of each other to make sure that they can connect. Digitization also does something else that's incredibly important, and that's centralizing it centralizes the data. So we have a better understanding of where the food is how much is available, how much is being used. Again, it's opt in so there's no kind of like you can use it with dignity everybody's using it there there's no poverty mandate that you have to be low income or be suffering from hunger to use it if you're a charity or nonprofit just access the food is there. So digitizing has been really critical across Canada for food. During the pandemic, we were able to allocate funding that we received from the government of Canada in the form of grants thought to $20,000. We had philanthropists give us funding that they want to allocate we could use that existing tool because it was in every community across Canada to allocate food funding grocery gift cards, take surveys collect data. So digitization and ease of use is going to be what's critical for businesses to get on board everywhere. Indeed, that sounds fascinating. And my last question to you would also be, what is the key lesson we've learned from a pandemic and what would be your call to action. I think the boldest interventions, the systemic interventions are the only ones that are going to save the world. And in Canada, we had Canadian emergency response benefit, which is basically a basic income and it still exists across Canada to ensure that, you know, it doesn't get so bad. And I think keeping those kind of systemic systems in place we learned, we learned that there's a lot of food we've across our food system that needs to be rescued but also needs to be processed. And what is that, what is the funding available for that to happen to make sure that we can process food, slow release it across our country so it's not bang bang bang, there's a billion potatoes please take them. It's, you know, there's a lot of everything. So those would be, oh, you know what the final one would be value food. Food is made for life. The commoditizing of food is really been our downfall. The lack of a systems approach to food systems has been our downfall and one of the greatest reasons we have so much food loss and waste. That's it, I'm done. Great. Thank you so much. We will now conclude another American panel and we'll move to a global perspective again, because there's one important aspect we haven't talked about it yet in detail and that's the importance of accessing real time information and data. So we probably all have heard the phrase what gets measured gets managed, which is also true for food loss and waste before a pandemic and also during the pandemic. And often we see there's a big gap between perceived and actual levels of food loss and waste. So we have the pleasure to have with us. Before we go to the Q&A session, Karola Fabi, who's a senior statistician at FAO, leaving a team on methodological innovation, and she also is the focal point for STG indicator 12.3.1, also known as the food loss index. Karola, over to you and we're looking forward to hear more about the importance of real time information during COVID-19 and new and innovative ways to understand the pandemic's impact on food chains. The floor is yours. Okay, thank you very much, Florian. Good morning. Good afternoon to everyone. Karola Fabian from the statistics division at FAO. So I'm going to share my screen I have. I will start with a short presentation and then we will move into the directly into the background that I feel developed. Can you see the screen? I'm sharing, am I? Yes, we can. And can you see how the power point, I mean the full screen power point? Yes, we see the full screen. Right, so really the question is, you know, what are the challenges in burning food losses and waste and I'm really trying to, I would like really to advocate for the importance of data and yet the need to find alternative solutions and alternative data sources, in situation of need and in an unprecedented crisis like the one the world is going through. So this is really just to set the stage. Some of you, I mean, I hope all of you have heard of the software report of FAO of 2019, where I updated the global estimate for food losses and said the new percentage over the supply chain only so not including consumption and the retail sector at 13.8%. And data was also available by commodity group like ECS slide and by country group. Now to get to these results that are extremely aggregated. It took two years, it took two years to build the model, two years to check the data and yet these figures are extremely aggregated and they are, they give a snapshot, they give an overview, one can turn them into aggregate value, it's over $400 billion worldwide. But they are not sufficiently detailed then to make a decision and to reduce losses in a specific high chain in a specific situation like we have heard and you have the other analysts have explained during their presentations. And what I mean is that this is a representation of the officially available data, the official data underneath the model of all the countries in the world. Only 39 countries officially reported data on food losses through FAO's agriculture question and starting many aspects, so we're talking about 30 years long time series and of the data that the cows produce many are estimated on fixed factors. So they are useful to set a benchmark and they are useful to make an overall estimate of food supply but of course not to monitor the impact over time or the change over time because it has been set a priority that losses are 5, 10, 15, 20, 25% of whatever commodities is being produced in a certain country. The columns are commodity groups and on the left one see good coverage for cereals, somewhat good coverage for roots and tuba, roots and tubas on the right, but the center is actually quite meaty and the very center is made meat and dairy and actually it's in dairy, it's in the dairy product and it's on eggs that there have been a lot of losses recently. So one sees that the official data that are available, not only are they scarce, but they do not address the immediate need that the community and the countries are having right now for that. By the way, all these figures are available in an online database on food loss and waste factors that the FAO has published, it contains official data as well as data for literature review, so it allows to delve in case studies and specific commodities and so on. So what happened with the COVID, there have been unforeseen impacts on the value chain and when it comes to losses and waste, the first news appeared in April. In April, Roy has published this article of this huge warehouse full of potatoes, 1,000 tons, getting rotten because restaurants had closed with a shalom and there was no demand for the site serving of French rice, it is so common in any Western style restaurant. A few days later, the New York Times, this big article of what happens on the front, so smashed eggs, clouding vegetables, that's the picture actually, these vegetables are being clouded back into the soil. And so food waste at the farm level due to the pandemic because of disruptions in the value chain. And this is happening, this happened very, very fast. It couldn't be collected and it can't be reflected in any systematic official data collection system. At the same time, on the other end of the spectrum, the COVID has had an impact on national statistics systems as well. There have been signals of value chain disruptions, but I mean when it comes to the statistics systems, we are facing the risk of a partial of total blackout of the statistics systems of data collection in a moment when quick response is the key and one needs on the contrary real real time data to understand what is happening, to know how to decide how to take action and to make sure that the action has been effective. So in order to apply the same intervention in other situation. So, and what happened for example is that in April, four countries suspend face to face interviews because of the lockdown. Now, and here one sees how the COVID increase the digital divide, because Western countries have got so a lot of digitized data collection platforms interviews, internet and so on, registers of all sorts. In, in the income countries with a higher literacy, the interview is the way to collect the data. So, the risk is that this year, or at the end of this year, there will be fewer data around, and not on food losses and waste but overall on on many other statistical, in many other statistical areas, and in particular, of course, agricultural statistics that are our main concern. And when it comes to food and waste, I mean that the contradiction is even more cracking, because the need is really for real time nation, what to do with that warehouse full of potatoes, what to do with those eggs and that milk that is going to spoil in the absence of a baseline. And that is how the big tattoo came to being about thinking about alternative data sources and these alternatives that the sources are the news. There is a lot of information around, but it comes through news, the social media, the newspapers, publishing, publishing information and so on. I'll take just one more slide and then we will go to, to the, we will go to the, to the platform. So what kind of analysis can be done. This is a kind of analysis here I have taken the selection of articles that Rosa has dealt into in her presentation. So we are in a position where what one can see to analyze news and see what they show. So on food losses and waste in particular, first of all, we see the geographical coverage. The Western world is publishing more news. So the western belt is better informed. In fact here, almost 40% of the set of news are about the US and in Canada that's over 40%, 40%. The other interesting thing that has emerged is that when one looks at the commodity groups. In fact, a lot of news are about the dairy, the dairy sector eggs, meat and fish. So what one sees is that while so far the emphasis was on cereals because cereals are the staple that are a lot of cereal losses are in storage and on the farm and so on. During the COVID pandemic. The situation has changed very quickly because the cereals are non perishable. We are in a situation of actually good house, good production in 2019 and so on. So cereals are not at the center. That's where there are more data, but they only make percent of the news in this. So what did we try to do and here I need to change. I need to change the screen that I am sharing and I go to here we are. Okay. So, so we did was to focus to try and find the news sources, the best news sources of information on the impact of the COVID on the value chain. So we set a set of automated queries. This website is automatically updated every day. Using with news found on the internet, a set of keywords that include food loss and waste, but also a number of kids about food chain disruptions and economic impact of the COVID worldwide. There is a database of the tweets of 300 newspapers worldwide, all their tweets. So there one can do a free search on any topic of interest, not only, not only food losses and waste and not food. And, and then we have developed some additional analysis on that. So for example, here I am showing what the analysis that we do on the newspaper tweets. We see by country, the newspaper tweets, what do they focus on, which are the keywords that emerge. I clicked on Argentina before. So we see is that in Argentina now the COVID is very much associated to the word food. One month ago, the word COVID was associated to the economy and debt because there was a risk of default of the country. So this is to say that this chart is updated regularly and points at what are the problems of a country over time. Another, when you look here on the top on the new we have a page with daily food prices of 14 commodities from a website that crowdsources prices on a daily basis. And we have given us to the two databases. So this is the data, the database on the tweet of the tweets. It's on tweets search unit to register but really a very simple operation. And while Dory Florian was introducing me I just typed food shortage to see what came up. So with food shortage one gets immediately that there is a new, there is an atoll in Nepal that there is actually even something about food shortage for fish in in Finland and so on. So you can find, I mean, and this is a mountain search engine so you can really put the words that you want. It also automatically translates these words to the six languages that are managed. So for, I mean, if you type wheat, you might find some French articles about French speaking countries that talk about wheat in French. The other another page is the news search so here we don't have the paper tweets but we have a wider set of news. As you can see the interface is exactly the same. We have now 28,000 news also selected with enough keywords, including the 27 most traded commodities, and you can filter them on the right as you wish. So for example, if we filter for food loss and waste that are 360 news. So it's a small share of the total. And here again it's a semantic search engine so you cannot drill down in your search as much into detail as as needed. The last thing that we added last week actually is a digest. So a day. We publish the we highlight actually the most important news of the previous day with English chapters. So these are the menu on food chain disruptions in the broader sense. The impact on commodities and food prices so the drill down here for example we see sweet potatoes in Kenya, Vietnamese leechy or an article of the global price watch countries response so a focus on the measures and some articles about what countries are doing and about what it can also help for inspiration seeing what is being done as well and a regional focus. So this again I mean three regions, the highlights for for three regions in the world. This is really the, I mean, I gave a very, very quick tour. I hope I didn't overflow my 10 minutes. I will be happy to to like to more questions on the culture, the method. And so I'm just to conclude. I mean the conclusion is really that, in fact, one sees can pay very dearly the lack of data so in fact, the, I would really like to advocate on the importance of not disrupting that collection side from, you know, activities. I mean, it's an important activities that serves vision making and policy making. And, of course, we have also seen and we have learned all the other measures of digitization. So digitized information has been immediately available and can be shared and it is open. It can be openly shared. And it is actually the one way to to provide a quick response. Of course, the coverage is the same. It's not comparable. I mean, there are sorts of comments when it comes to treating this information as Reata, but it is nevertheless real time it describes what is actually happening. And so it can help make decisions and mitigating the impact of food chains and hopefully on food losses and based. Thank you. Thank you so much, Karola. And we encourage all of you to explore this new big data tool and see what in your countries, what media reports are covering what community items, what are the new issues coming up. So we invite you to explore this tool. We will now move into the Q&A session answering questions from you the audience. And I would like to start with Laurie Nickel. There seems to be some disbelief that the percentage of food loss and waste in Canada was estimated at 58%. So I was wondering if you wanted to clarify that number and also if you have any recommendations for food waste and food rescue in schools. Sure. So we did, we hired value chain management international who are world renowned researchers on food loss and waste to actually do the research from across the supply chain. And so I recommend everybody go to the www.secondharvest.ca slash research. It'll show you exactly where across the supply chain and why things are wasted and it has, I think, 200 recommendations on how to ensure that we waste less. And the first one, as I think we all agree, is measurement. Reality is in Canada and I think everywhere else, we're not measuring it or we're not measuring it consistently. And so this was the first time we were using primary data across Canada to determine that. Oh, and in schools. So schools, I love that question. My background is in child nutrition. In Canada, we do not have a national federal program for child nutrition. And so I had to start one in my own child school. And the first thing I did was knock on a retailer's door and say, Can I have your surplus food. So we know that there's a lot of extra food in the system and most of our schools are doing that already. We're working with school boards to do this in a more systematic way to ensure that the food is more regular, let's say, like of the different types of food. So you've got produce and it's always a pineapple or something. But there is a lot of opportunity to push that great food, perishable produce, dairy and protein into the school system that is community led. Excellent. Thank you for an answer. Our next question is for Blake. So you mentioned that some of the distribution centers had to close. Can you give us any sense of what percentage of distribution centers had to close and how much was the increase in terms of demand, which I think you mentioned which was 60% but could you let us know about the distribution centers. Our network estimated that about 20% of their partner agencies were diminished or had closed operations so they were restricted. We had a handful of food banks that had short term closures to respond to outbreaks within their own food bank. So with in respect to getting in and doing sanitation and and restarting the food bank up. We had a few closures on that standpoint for the most part we've been very lucky that most of our food banks have had continuous operations through all this. Excellent. Thank you. Then we have a question to you Rosa from Jagger Harvey, who's director of the Fiti Future Innovation Lab for reducing post harvest losses at Kansas State University. And the question is how is FAO integrating food safety into reducing food loss and waste. Thank you very much for your question. Indeed food safety is a cross cutting element of all of the work that we do to address food loss and waste reduction in the supply chains in which we work. You know, starting I mean, whatever we do, especially when we're talking particularly for example in the crop supply chains. Quality and safety a paramount in terms of sharing managing quality and assurance safety through this different systems of certification, but also different practical approaches applied to address food safety issues across the different systems in which we work. It's not only crops wherever in terms of livestock in terms of fisheries. It is a very, very important dimension of FAO's work. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you. One more question for Karola. What is the best method for countries to measure food loss and waste survey administrative records. And could you share an example of a country which has successfully collected most of this data. So, there is no single, there is no single method in fact sample surveys are especially food loss surveys can be quite complex and expensive. So, what we recommend is to use a mix of a mix of methods in order to keep costs, collection costs under control. The sample surveys are providing the, let's say the soundest and representative results. So the best results in a situation where there are a lot of small businesses. And so the only way to capture the average, to capture the distribution and to have an accurate measure is to have a representative sample. So we are talking here about, for example, the small farmers, the small farmers in low income countries. When the market or the activity is integrated and there are a few big actors, two large companies who are vertically integrated and who keep very accurate accounts and who have a sound grip on their production processes. They know very well how much they lose then the company's records are just as good. And even, for example, when it comes to food processor to have some technical factors from the industry can be reliable enough at the account level. But if there are only few actors, of course, who cover the vast majority of the market. We are also favorable to modeling losses, but then when the model is entirely replacing collection, then it has to be soundly tested and and developed. And it's quite a demanding work at the beginning then of course there are a lot savings down the road when it comes to updating the model just with a few variables. That's the so, but to come back to the question. So because we our guidelines, our comments, I mean, we strongly recommend sample service, but it is with in mind the idea of a small, I mean, of an in full sector made of a lot of small or small actors. There it is the real way to to get to an accurate and accurate. Okay, thank you, Karola. And our last question goes to Megan. Do you see are there any plans in the food waste reduction Alliance to help set up recycling infrastructure. Here we go. The food waste reduction Alliance is not currently working on packaging recycling infrastructure but we are working on food waste recycling infrastructure like anaerobic digestion or composting. But recycling infrastructure, especially in the US is a critically important issue and project for the consumer brands association. We know that we have to use packaging in order to get many kinds of food especially highly perishable food safely and with quality and tack to consumers all around the world and also know that packaging can often really prevent waste and especially food waste, which has an enormous greenhouse gas impact and climate impact. So, but the recycling and the collection of that packaging is equally important to the waste prevention. So we have launched a major initiative around recycling, putting out a policy platform in April with some concrete ideas and how we think we can really fix the recycling system and the waste system here in the US to make it work better for consumers for the environment and and for the business community that's a major initiative about. Excellent. Thank you so much Megan. With that we will conclude our session and we really thank all of you for bearing with us for almost two hours. It's such an important topic and we're happy that there's such a big interest in it. In conclusion, I think we've seen that as with many other issues covert has really exposed and exacerbated some of the pre existing challenges in our food system and that includes food loss and waste. And reducing food loss and waste is crucial to increase the efficiency and sustainability of our food systems, delivering better nutrition and food security, as well as environmental benefits. There is still an urgent need to raise awareness about the economic social and environmental impacts of food loss and waste and the coronavirus crisis could be a key moment to address this diverse and complex challenges that cause food loss and waste. We want to encourage you all of you again to observe September 29 as the first international day of awareness of food loss and waste as a new opportunity for action that will come every year and invite you all to join the global campaign. One further announcement on 13th July, the 2020 state of food security and nutrition in the world report will be released at the high level political forum in New York, which will include updated numbers on global food systems, on the nourishment and malnutrition and underline the need to transform global food systems for affordable healthy diets. On July 14, we invite all of you to a discussion on the key findings of the report, co-hosted by FAO North America and IFPRI, which will feature high level speakers such as the FAO Director General Chudung Yu and IFPRI Director General Joe Henson. Thank you one more time so much for our distinguished speakers, for our panelists, for all you as participants, for all the food heralds from farm to fork who keep our food supply chains going. We hope you stay safe and stay tuned. Thank you very much for joining us today.