 Yes, hello everybody, I am Christina Petraki and I head the FL eLearning Academy. We are extremely pleased to welcome you to this first of a series of international technical webinars that the FL eLearning Academy is organizing with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific together with Agrinium which is a big network of French agriculture and food sciences institutions. So the objective of these webinars, the objectives are really to try to have an open space to share an exchange knowledge and experiences and on thematic areas, on the global challenges that we are all facing basically. All the thematic areas that will be covered in the webinars are all aligned with the SDG with the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 2030 and all these different thematic areas are also covered in a number of eLearning courses which are offered free of charge by the FL eLearning Academy. So I just wanted to share with you right now the link to the FL eLearning Academy. This is a multi-lingual platform that offers free multi-lingual eLearning courses on a number of thematic areas which are all going to be covered in the various webinars that we will be having. So just a few more more words. If you want to ask questions you just have to click on the chat button which is on your screen underneath and we will try to do our best to answer all the questions. We will also be gathering all the questions and all the answers in a document afterwards and this webinar is being recorded in order to give the opportunity to do colleagues and to the professionals in other time zones to benefit from these webinars. So just to let you know we will also be informing you about the next ones so there is an agenda for 2020 of all the different webinars which are going to cover a number of thematic areas such as soil management and restoration, water management, nutrition sensitive food systems but also climate change a number of thematic areas and we you will always be informed. My colleagues Fabio Picinic and Sara Ferrante who are behind the scenes will be keeping you informed. For today we have a very interesting webinar and we are extremely lucky to have two senior experts from FAO. One is from the nutrition division Rosa Roye who will be talking to us about who will be sharing with us also. Some knowledge about how to reduce food loss and from the statistics division of FAO we have Karola Fabi who will be talking to us about the methodologies that are available to measure food losses. Now in these two cases with Rosa Roye we have there is already an e-learning course available on the FAO e-learning academy on on food losses and we are about to publish a course with Karola Fabi on on the SDG indicator 1231. So this is all for now I would like now to give the floor to Rosa who will be presenting us some ideas about how to reduce food losses. Thank you very much. Thank you Christina but Rosa the floor is yours. Okay thank you very much Christina good day everybody afternoon evening wherever you may be or good morning it's a pleasure to today to be able to deliver this presentation titled horticultural chain management managing quality and reducing post harvest losses. I try to hold on to advance by slide sorry I'm having a problem advancing the slides please Arista. Rosa I think you can simply advance by clicking on your keyboards or even with the mouse. Try also with the mouse okay now it's moving yeah okay perfect okay sorry for this this introduction. Since 1967 with the launch of the action program on food food loss prevention FAO has been working with countries to address the reduction of post-service loss in particular and then moving forward to 2015 you could see the blue arrows on the screen world leaders across have endorsed the sustainable development goals and SDG 12 in particular has given us a very strong imperative to scale up actions and initiatives to focus on food loss and waste reduction and particularly to address post-harvest loss reduction which is a subset of food losses and also this is most relevant at this time particularly as we are facing the current COVID pandemic. Now SDG 12.3 target in particular calls for having per capita global food waste at the retail level and consumer levels and reducing food losses along production and supply chains including post-harvest losses. To get us all on the same page what I'd like to do first of all is to introduce FAO's definitions on food loss and waste. These are very well documented also in the state of food and agriculture which was published a flagship publication of FAO which was published last year and launched in October 2019. As you can see here food loss is defined as the decrease in the quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by food suppliers in the chain excluding retail food service providers and consumers. Food loss effectively takes place between post-harvest and the wholesale markets and Karola will also explain a little bit more on what she does in terms in that context. Food waste on the other hand is the decrease in the quality and quantity of food resulting from decisions and actors by retailers food services and consumers so it effectively takes place at the retail level in the food service sector and at the consumer level. Now why is it important to reduce food loss and waste? Reducing food loss and waste and particularly post-harvest loss which is a subset of food losses as I highlighted can bring about significant benefits to society as a whole and they can result in increasing the availability of food particularly for vulnerable groups the most vulnerable groups. They reduce pressure on reducing food losses and waste reduces pressure on our natural resource space the land water that is required for production. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions as well that arise during production as well as as food goes into landfills and it also increases productivity and economic growth while also contributing to other the attainment of other SDGs SDG2 which relates to nutrition SDG 13, 14, 15 and 8. So what we are looking at today is really where you see the blue arrows on the screen the program titled horticultural chain management is actually focusing on issues related to post-harvest loss reduction that is far upstream in the chain as well as managing quality and ensuring improvements in as far as possible in nutritional quality and content of food in terms of the way in which we manage the food as it transmits as it transits from the farm up to the wholesale market. Now the program that we are talking about today horticultural chain management was conceived by FAO somewhere in the early 2000s and that was at the time where we were working on the global initiative on post-harvest losses and we consulted in various regions on what their priority requirements were and these the two manuals that we have produced will actually produce as a result of these consultations. One was produced for the southeast eastern southern Africa in collaboration with the University of Pretoria South Africa and the other was produced in Thailand with a number of different stakeholders from across the Asian region and it was focused on of course that region. I just wanted to acknowledge that the the program for eastern southern Africa was actually supported by the partnership with the Commonwealth Secretariat and that for the Asia Pacific region was supported by FAO through Multidono Trust. All of our work in both regions commenced with classroom level training, site visits and hands-on activities, in those training activities with the broad spectrum of stakeholders. But because of country demand expressed by countries in particularly in the Asian region, a lot of this then transformed and transmitted into going into field level work and I'll describe some of that in the course of my presentation. Where are we now with these publications? They will produce somewhere about between 2007 and 2009. We are now in the process of updating them because as you can see on the screen, fundamental issues remain the same, the objectives are to manage quality, assure safety and reduce loss. But of course we have to align our work with the sustainable development goals and this is what we are doing as we go into our work in the field. So a lot of what we are doing now is focused on looking at into innovations, technological but also organizational business approaches to enhance the efficiency and the sustainability in the value chains in which we work. Okay now I'd like to get into the heart of my presentation which is to focus on the actions at the field level to manage quality, assure safety and reduce loss and in this context I want to focus on the traditional supply chains because these are where you have the highest levels of losses in horticultural crops largely because of the fact this these chains are very production oriented, very fragmented and then you have a very limited use of the post-havis technology because this is where a lot of the small holders operate and with very limited resources they're very inefficient. When I worked in the Asia Pacific region for example it takes 24 to 48 hours quite often for produce to reach the fresh produce markets. Nevertheless these are the supply chains that also feed the majority of people in mass markets. So in terms of the approaches that we take we work at three levels at the meso level, the micro level and the micro level. Much of the data and evidence that we generate to support the decision making by stakeholders is done at the meso level and we also do quite a lot of work integrating academia into the work that we are supporting at the field level in projects so that we can actually collect information, technical information and data to underpin all of what it is we are doing with the stakeholders. In terms of our stakeholders we are working at the meso level with organized groups of farmers and supply chain stakeholders in all of our projects. It's a fundamental requirement, we do not work with individuals. If there are individuals in some countries where systems don't exist we actually help facilitate and support them to to get organized and we also work in collaboration, we also invite private sector entities to work with us because over time what we have found is that when we bring in the private sector entities without any of our assistance or what happens in the course of a lot of these training programs and activities at the field level is that business linkages are developed and things move on so that when we leave a lot of the countries there's already progress being made in terms of what we have implemented on the ground. In one of the countries that we work for example we invited members of the private sector from supermarkets to come in and to share with the participants at a meeting, the stakeholders what their requirements were and at the end of that meeting and the end of the training they actually supported the supplies of plastic rates to facilitate those small holders in improving on their transport operations and by doing so and transferring some of their post-havis activities back to the field, the quality that they received in their supermarkets was much higher but also they increased the incomes of these small holders by up to 40% and as I highlighted also we are engaged in working in collaboration with academia to also collect more information to really help us to enhance what it is we are doing in a more pragmatic and practical approach in terms of the next the next series of training programs that we develop. Now I'd like to look at some of the actions that we are undertaking at the field level and to a large extent the field level and implementation is designed to catalyze action and uptake of some of these technologies and approaches that we're using and so that and to inform scale up of actions. So in so doing we are building an evidence base through the conduct of surveys to understand of course market demands as well as the knowledge attitude and practices of our stakeholders so that we can better address their specific needs and then we move on to mapping the supply chain to identify the critical loss points in the supply chains and their underlying causes. Now it's important to identify these critical loss points because they are the points in the supply chain where losses are of the highest magnitude. They also help us to inform measures to reduce food loss and waste and as my colleague Karola will highlight they are a very important link to the food loss index. Once identified we begin to work with the stakeholders to identify innovations and some innovative approaches that are economically, socially and environmentally suitable for the context and also to meet the needs of the specific target markets and some of these innovations that we have found in our will actually sit on the shelves in research centers in many countries from the early days of post-havoc interventions. So some of these we're able to do sometimes with some modification we actually are able to put them to work and to through piloting with stakeholders and then we collect a lot of the technical information the guidance documents and use that information to develop technical support materials that we distribute back to the stakeholders as well as some decision support material which is based on the economic analysis and more descriptive type of material but I will come to that in more specific detail later on. So now I'd like to give you just to go through an example of some of the work that we have supported on the mango value chains and this work was done in the Philippines. These are what you're seeing on the screen here essential steps of the mango value chain in the traditional mango value chains in the Philippines where the mangoes are harvested using some of the locally fabricated harvesters and they are then packed in packed into plastic crates and then sorted after which they are transferred to these baskets that are very somewhat flexible and then as you can see in the photograph D they are stacked these flexible baskets are stacked one on top of the other and they are transported to the wholesale market at the wholesale market in E you can see where they are being repackaged and then moving into to the retail markets and then of course a lot of the work that was done was to to assess what was happening in retail and it's not simulated retail it's actually what is happening in actual retail conditions and here you see what the mangoes look like on arrival at the wholesale market yes all of them are saleable there's zero quantitative loss but just look at the quality clearly they suffered quite a bit of quality loss if you look at A B and C you see a lot of mechanical damage from bruising abrasion sometimes on B the marks of the bamboo basket and so on and then from D and E and F you see the latex staining on the mangoes so as a consequence of this this damage mechanical damage the mangoes have a very short shelf life and they ripen very rapidly like here you can see after five days you have up to 90% compression damage becoming evident as the mangoes ripen also what happens as the mangoes maintain in retail what you see happen and you see the manifestation of latent infestations and these actually pre-havoc infestations which only become apparent when the mangoes begin to ripen so that's another critical loss point that has to be addressed in the supply chain so this is a summary of what we actually put together after having done the work at the field level and if you look here you can see that based on the findings that have just described what two critical interventions are required one is that of reducing mechanical damage and the second one is that of managing the latent infestations that manifest and result in rapid decay and the unsightly appearance of these sorry of the mangoes now it's it's quite interesting when you look at here the loss you'll see that from harvest to wholesale you see zero loss but that's the quantitative loss and what from what I show you it was very clear that there's a lot of qualitative loss taken place and but according to our definition that I provided earlier on in the retail that is waste so because we have poor quality going from wholesale to retail what happens you have a very high level of waste and a short shelf life as a result now as you can see here by switching from the use of the straw baskets to the plastic rates see that the level of severe compression has almost completely disappeared even up to day five and the whole issue of all of these different types of the level of qualitative loss will also is also substantially reduced and then again you see the level of moderate compression also much lower than initially but there's still some and what the crates do the use of the crates they help to minimize the mechanical damage by because the crates are very steady they are able to absorb the vibration and in so doing make a big difference now to address the the latent infestations the anthracnose infestation and stem emerald you can see if you look on the left hand side A and C you see how attractive the the mangoes actually look of course you can see that we did not accomplish a hundred percent reduction of the stem and rod in A but you have a very substantial difference in terms of what you see on B compared to A and in the same for the anthracnose you can see what happens in the traditional system versus the improved system and there's a significant difference in terms of the appearance and the quality over five days in retail and of course by using applying the two treatments in tandem with good practice you can see that the economic benefit is generated because you improve the both the quality and the shelf life now the hot water treatment is something that has to be done within the first 24 to 36 hours of harvest of the mango it's not something that can be done at the retail level if it's not done within 24 to 36 hours of harvest you still have the problem with the infestations it's something that has to to happen even as soon as the the produce is harvested before it starts moving through the rest of the supply chain so all of the evidence that we produced we produce in these types of projects is analyzed and then we come up with policy recommendations which we document and also we disseminate to policy makers through our FAO offices our partners and also as we go along in terms of and we use them to support different countries with the same sorts of issues and problems we also document a number of all of the work that we are doing and and disseminate them as public goods for example we don't we document case studies we produce technical guidance documents fact sheets which also provide decision support they give a lot of the key elements of the detail of the economic analysis what it means for shelf life and so on to help would be investors that we find the traders we don't have very to convince them very much to do any of this because as soon as they see the benefit they begin to start to invest in in in the improved technologies for the average small holder who is going into a traditional market it's a little bit more difficult because of the the issue of the access to credit to be able to procure the plastic rates however we see what we see emerging we see a number of new business models emerging where you find that even now the the transporters of the fresh produce are actually beginning to take up some of that work so a number of these the technical guidance documents are designed to actually support all of these different stakeholders involved to actually to do to to apply good practice in in their operations during transport during loading unloading anything that could cause any sort of damage and compromise quality is addressed in these guidance documents and then also reproduce different types of guidelines to support further work with the stakeholders these are some examples of some of the support materials that we produce and also it's not only a targeting of course the the traditional supply chains but also those who are interested to scale up to the next level we also have material to support that type of work and of course FAU addresses both but in this case a lot of the focus that we have had in much of based on specific requests from the countries in the specific period in which we were working was to look at what was happening in local context and then we also share a lot of this material through a dedicated platform to post harvest loss reduction food loss and waste reduction that's our community of practice on food loss and waste which is a convener of knowledge related to post harvest loss reduction it's now being expanded to talk about food losses sorry to talk about waste as well waste as well and it addresses both pulses different types of staple crops as well as the perishable horticultural crops now last but not least our micro level stakeholders which the most important to us the ones that I like to talk about because they we do quite a lot of training awareness sensitization at the national level but also with the specifically concerned groups so here I see some of the training programs and then the other thing that we do is to bring the groups together after at the end of the projects as you know as a region as regional groups and this is what seems to be working out extremely well in terms of technology exchange and transfer within a specific region for example this harvesting equipment that was developed in Bangladesh for mangoes became one of the most popular items demanded across the countries in south asia because normally they would just shake the mango trees to to harvest the mangoes but when they saw the difference and the impact of this harvesting tool it's something that has now become it's many of the countries were very excited and interested in actually having access to and making and actually fabricating those items of the equipment and these types of regional gatherings also are extremely useful in helping people to develop networks that help them to share and exchange and address their specific issues and concerns so I'd like to acknowledge that the work that I have highlighted today and shared with you was supported by FAO through a letter of agreement with the University of the Philippines Los Banyos and in the framework of a partnership between that institution and FAO in closing I would just like to highlight that this year for the first time the international and international day of awareness of food loss and waste will be observed on the 29th of September 2020 so we invite you to join us and stay tuned for more information about that thank you very much thank you very much Rosa thank you very much Rosa for this very interesting presentation also what I believe the participants have appreciated is also the reference to the guidance document that give very practical tips on how to reduce food loss just to mention that we are having really participants from all over the world from Greece, Spain, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, China I mean really also what wasn't expected also from Latin America because they're on a different time zones and we weren't expecting them this is to say that I would like to ask you Rosa to please have a look at the questions and to at the end of the seminar we will give you the opportunity maybe to respond to some of the questions because actually there were a lot of questions also related to the treatment of mango with hot water and other very practical issues so maybe if you meanwhile have a look at the questions and and we will give you a space to to answer them meanwhile I would like to ask Karola to to you have the floor Karola so Karola Fabi will be describing a little bit the methodology that is being used worldwide to basically measure food losses and there will be a new learning course that will be produced in the coming weeks exactly on this thematic area and I would like to remind you all that there is the FAE Learning Academy has a course on identifying the critical loss points along the food value chains which is on the e-learning academy on the category nutrition and food systems where you can have access to it these resources are free and available at any time anywhere to anyone in the world so the floor is yours Karola yes thank you very much Christina and hello to everybody I mean it's quite overwhelming to be speaking to 500 people from all over the world it's a great opportunity and honor so I'm taking over from Rosa and bringing you to the other side of the problem which is the one on measurement you will see a tremendous difference between her presentation and mine where there are no pictures and actually I was thinking that I could have put some of the pictures from the field surveys to actually to give a better idea of how data collection takes place in the field my presentation is still uploading it still doesn't respond to to the commands so like I said in fact we are going to move from the the practicalities so the action to reduce losses along the supply chain to how to build the evidence base and what FAO has done in terms of public goods to provide national and international stakeholders with tools to improve knowledge on food losses along the supply chain like Rosa highlighted at the beginning of her presentation this is a long process a milestone was the very famous 2011 study that estimated one third the amount of food produced that is lost or waste in the food chain and the that study also shed the light on another factor and it's the dire lack of data and data scarcity that is underlying the the issue and so the the weak the weak amount of evidence that is available so what we are going to see she has also highlighted how losses and decisions can take place at the micro meso and macro level there is quite a lot of there is also there is quite a lot of knowledge around but this knowledge is very scattered and is created with very with a variety of definitions and measurement methods so one of the problems in making decisions is that it is difficult to compare the information difficult to compare the data so one of the things that FAO has tried to produce is a framework that helps putting the information at the various level the very detailed and the very aggregated into a consistent place to build a consistent picture of the problem and also have every single piece of information contributing to to the overall knowledge now let's see because really this does not seem to respond so the outline of my presentation is I'll go to another I will share another uh let's see it's okay maybe the screen is smaller let's see with a smaller screen it responds better it goes uh yeah is the screen moving with me maybe it's moving yes okay good it's moving but we can see all the uh I know I will increase I will increase the size of the and maybe I will this one here that we don't okay okay and I increase the size of the slide at least we can move on okay so we're right so what was the problem basically in the 2011 the 2011 study also highlighted the lack of a common definition at the lack the lack of a measurement framework and the lack of data so we're going first to really look at the boundaries and definition that led to a food loss index and an indicator for the SDG we will see how the basically the demand for that is so huge that one needs to focus the data collection effort and the evidence base and this is what Rosa had started to talk about when she highlighted the need for carrying out value chain analysis to identify the critical hotspots and the causes of losses so that information is paramount to be able to focus at a collection where it matters where an intervention uh matters then we will see what is the status of knowledge on food losses especially in East and Southeast Asia because this was supposed to be the biggest focus of this seminar and we will see a very short overview of the food loss index how it's structured how it is interpreted and compiled and what are the available resources so the methodology the technical documents and other tools so we all know the target that Rosa has also reminded us with its two components the supply side and food loss component and the demand side consumption and retail with a food waste component so the target has been because the two tracks of the food chain respond to different triggers and different policy questions and to some extent are linked even to other sustainable development goals the two elements of this of the target have been assigned to two different indicators so we're going to focus on the on food losses on what happens on the supply chain from production up to but not including the retail and this also replies to one of the questions of the participants who was asking why do we already speak about food losses because FAO had the mandate for this indicator and because what happens on the supply side of the chain is also more relevant for the traditional for the traditional value chains characterized by a large number of small holders so we focus the presentation on this more specific aspect sorry Karola to interrupt you a few participants are asking if you could put back in full screen is that possible for you maybe let's see does it let's see if it works yes now it has it has updated the it has uploaded the whole file so it works thanks a lot okay let's go on good thank you so one of the first efforts was really to set the boundary between the food loss index and the food waste index because these two indicators are quite different because they have to inform different sets of policies and so the food loss index and the measurement methodology that companies it starts on the farm and reaches the retail level and covers all the stages of the value chain where that the product crosses and where losses can can occur harvest losses or losses at slaughter are a particular point of the value chain and so they are treat they are included in the methodology but okay we can hear you very well can you try to talk louder and see if you're and check your microphone please yeah I think that something changed with your microphone settings because all of a sudden we can see we can hear you but you are farther so just check on this more arrow that you see next to the microphone icon on the on the bottom okay now it's better now it's better already okay yeah I think that it's because I had received the call and rejected the call so probably that okay thanks thank you yeah just go back to okay so yeah that's right so we were talking about so the first effort was really to clarify the boundaries between the food loss index and the food waste index and losses in a sustainable development goal start with production and and at the retail now there would there will be a challenge in aggregating the food loss index and the food waste index because losses are about the efficiency of the value chain and we have heard Rosa talking about the income of farmers and so on and so losses are tracked along the value chain for single commodities and they are expressed in the indicator in terms of percentage it's the percentage loss for that product in that place of the value chain whereas waste we hear in bulk waste are the number of kilos per person how much waste is produced by municipalities by consumers by the population as a whole so the 2011 study that had a very macro approach and that could cover the whole supply chain was very strong in raising awareness but is not was not really offering a tool for making this decision which is what the food reconciliation exercise of course then to have a combined food loss and waste index now that there is a methodology for for the food waste index I am very sorry my internet connection isn't stable and so again I cannot move the presentation so I need to okay I need to go back to the to the to this kind of screen the so the a lot of scattered information and one of the problems was the enormous variability of definition of food losses so Rosa presented the definition of food losses that has been adopted which is a decrease in the quantity or quality of food but for the measurement the measurement has to focus on quantity losses only because it is complex and too complicated to measure qualitative losses all along the value chains for a large number of commodities on a national scale what the methodology does is to recommend collecting information on prices and on the destination of the products because through the different prices and through the different destinations one can infer on the quality on the on the lower on the lower qualities that leads to a lower price or even to a different destination a product that can't be sold on the fresh market but that has to go to processing or even to some less valuable less valuable destinations so the first problem in collecting the data is really understanding the data needs like Rosa said food losses are not necessarily a policy a policy objective per se but they serve other policy objectives so it is important to understand what the political decisions are and what the priorities are on food losses where they occur in volume in percentages how relevant the food loss points are maybe because they concern a very large number of people a very large number of small holders or of households and the cost effectiveness of a possible intervention maybe because in front of a small intervention cost there is a very high benefit and so that is going to be a priority area for intervention that is where a measurement a good measurement is needed to be able to measure the impact assessment to do a cost benefit analysis before before intervening to analyze the trade-offs and so on but of course the loss data must be complemented on other information on the causal factors to see the impact of the change and on the economic and economic environment as at large I'm sorry sorry Karla to interrupt you again I see that a couple participants are saying that they cannot hear you clearly I think that this is a connection issue so what I suggest is that you can perhaps turn off your webcam okay but you can still you can still share the actually Aristeet is going to turn off your webcam and you can still go back to the okay so now you can go back to full presentation mode and maybe slow down a little bit because sometimes there are some issues with the sound and maybe it was because of the bandwidth of the of the streaming so another important thing another important link between the data and the policy is really in seeing what are the effects along the value chain in fact the software report that Rosa has introduced does a lot of in-depth analysis of the trade-offs along the value chain because by reducing losses and thus increasing quantities there can be an impact on prices downstream greater quantities should lead to lower prices or an impact on demand more fish food processing process might lead to a lower demand for for the primary crop so these are all aspects will be born in mind also in terms of the measurement where to do the measure what is the policy about so where to do the measure what other info collect in order to have all the elements that are necessary to take the good decision and to monitor the decisions okay i'm trying to go down but again the presentation maybe sharing you can stop sharing and then restart sharing and it will be really good if you can also go back to the presentation full presentation mode because i think it's easier for for some participants to see it unfortunately there are still some issues also with the sound i'm sure this is related to the connection from your area i don't know if it could be in Rome but here it is so i will do okay i will do something i will change my internet connection to my telephone that is maybe stronger just be careful if you do that because you might be logged out if you go to another okay so i don't okay so let me go back to the full screen okay okay so back to focusing the data collection effort is so the another key point is to choose to to monitor only a few commodities the commodities on which the policies are looking at the action is taken and focus on the critical loss point and this is a necessary step to reduce the data collection effort because one of the reasons why there is so little data around is that post-service losses are costly they are complicated and costly so the only way to have good quality data is to reduce the scope of the surveys to the few areas where they matter the key commodities the hotspots the critical loss points and then use a mix of lighter estimation methods on the other areas on the plane now let's have a look at the current status of the losses after the 2011 study we developed a food loss estimation model whose results were disseminated with a software report in in october 2019 and the estimates of the software report are that losses along the supply chain after harvest up to but not including the retail are 14 percent you know so we are talking here of an apparently smaller percentage than the 2011 study but one has to consider that the two figures are really not comparable it's a different tract of the supply chain it's a completely different estimation method but these estimates come from a model so they are replicable we can reproduce them and a lot of new evidence has become available in the last few years and so all this led to a different result which is the one that we are starting to work with to work with now said this of course there are huge differences across regions and there are huge differences across commodities this is the heat map of the basic data underneath the model in the east and southeast asia region and again it's to show you how little data there is around what you have on the columns are the countries where there is data so it starts with vietnam vietnam till more less than thailand and so on so you see that there are fewer countries than you have in the region and the columns are the main categories of products in the food loss in the supply chain and on the left the bluest column are cereals so most of the information is available for cereal some information is available for fruits and vegetables which is the next column but when we move to the middle where we have meat for example or other crops you can see that there is very little data around and where you can see dark blue it means that there are fewer than five observations over a 20-year period so this really is to call for data collection and to call for the importance of building a sound evidence base because all the estimates that you see are built on this all the estimates that you see around are built on this this is the representation of all the officially reported data and of the data that was found in the scientific and great literature around having now a look at the status of knowledge on fruits and vegetables i focused on fruits and vegetables also because there were some questions before before the webinar on this particular on this particular sector these are this is the distribution of losses of percentage of fruits and vegetables in east and now this asia so you can see that they tend to be higher than than the 14 than the 14 carola carola sorry this is christina i read a few comments and they were saying if you can go back to the previous graph and explain well the color coding this one yes okay yes because they would like to understand they would like to understand exactly what is okay on the okay uh so the color coding is a legend on the right it goes from dark blue to yellow and as it becomes more yellow it means that there is more information so there is very good information on cereals in indonesia and actually indonesia attract rice losses since 2011 there is good information in japan that has a light green on cereals and yellow on meat actually meat and milk the philippines have got a fairly large amount of data and also several observations on cereals but when you see the dark blue in vietnam it means less than five observations so the the lighter the color the more the information this uh heat map is automatically generated by an online database you see the link on the slide you can recreate it yourself for all the combinations of countries commodities sources of data and so on so this is just an example you can really this is one of the public goods that we have created and you can you can use it at leisure not only you can download the data underneath and the links to the original sources of this so on the x-axis basically you have the different food the different categories groups and on the on the y-axis you have different countries exactly the countries in east and southeast asia exactly and so on the x-axis you you you then have the different food groups and and then the color indicates the of course the amount of information available yes that's right um so this chart is another chart that is automatically generated by that database and here we see the distribution of losses of food and that of fruits and vegetables in east and southeast asia on the various stages of the supply chain and the interesting part is to see the variability so again one can see the need for accurate measurements because of course this is a summary of all the studies and all the countries so it makes a difference if losses are 10 or 30 percent uh this is another analysis that we did it's not a chart that you will find on the database but it was really uh the a quick comparison of uh cereal losses in pink fruits and vegetable losses in light blue uh across the various regions of the world and so you can see that east asia in the end has very few observations because the dots are really very very small and east uh and eastern asia here we don't have southeast asia but eastern asia has also got relatively small uh of relatively small um uh lost percentages in comparison with the rest of the world for example you can see fruit losses of south and central america being much higher than in the rest of the world here and east asia having very few observation points for cereals here and the rest of asia here where with of course fruit losses higher than a cereal losses but not not that high that higher so let's see now how this fits into the food loss index so the observation at the very micro level how do they progressively build and aggregate into a single uh into a single indicator now how did the food loss index uh uh develop of course it's to provide a a reply to uh and give an indicator that says if there is a reduction of food losses along the supply chain by 2030 so that's what it measures it's an index that starts at 100 in the base period and then if losses are reduced it goes it moves below 100 so if in 2030 the index is equal to 90 it means that there has been progress on food losses reduction of course uh this is not let's say that this helps the sg monitoring but it doesn't help decision making at the country level or at the or at the single value chain level um although so the index itself in fact is based on food loss percentages and food loss percentages can be interpreted as the percentage of production that does not reach the retail stage this is already a figure that is relevant for decision making or for highlighting a problem or an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the value chain and to compile the index there are several steps the first is really to select the commodities and compile the weights okay that's because one has to come to several losses of several commodities to a single figure to compile the food loss percentages of the commodities and that is the big challenge and then comparing losses over time one gets uh the sdg indicator so one thing about uh the food loss index is that it measures uh the loss percentages of the commodities over time why is that so because very often in the official estimates in this to the expert opinions in the studies what you find are a constant percentage losses that are applied across time so if you look at the total losses that are derived as a multiplication of a percentage to total production you will get losses that change over time but in fact it's production that is changing over time so you see here that production fluctuates as usual in uh I mean with crop it's very obvious that yield changer from year to year and you have the orange line there is an expert opinion generated loss percentage that is constant at 15 and so there are the end showing losses in gray that show a kind of that show fluctuation maybe a very weak trend maybe not but it's an optical illusion so it's by looking at the loss percentage that one can see the structural changes in the loss level how the index is built is by looking at losses along the supply chain and the percentage losses along the supply chain to get to a full loss percentage for one commodity at the national level and so here you see importance of the analysis of the value chain that Rosa was explaining in representation because one needs this is a very simplified representation of the value chain one needs to one needs to have a description of the value chain for that commodity in the country identify the hotspots and do some accurate measures in the in the actual hotspots then when building the food loss index in fact the loss percentages of the various products are aggregated into one food loss percentage for the whole country and by doing a ratio of the food loss percentage in the current year to the base period one calculates the index the index is really the very last step of the calculation and it's the one that is relevant only for international monitoring but not for decision-making at the country level which is I understand what is of greater concern for all of them so let's see now in terms of the available resources and the and the way forward what do we put what did we produce that you can use first of all the food losses and waste database already introduced with the three charts this is the homepage of the database you have the link you can see here these are all the filters for selecting your queries and you can see here there are the tabs and so you can produce one of the charts that you saw the last tab is the data so you can see the table with the data you can download it and you can download the references to the original to the original sources we have produced a methodology for the food loss index that provides a common method a method for everyone to adopt for aggregating losses along the supply chain and for compiling the food loss index but along with the method for the index we have produced the guidelines for the measurement of harvest and post harvest losses this is the cover of the guidelines for grains those on fruits and vegetables are in the final stages of editing and the ones on milk and meat and fish products are being revised and publication they've also produced the technical reports on the field tests that you will find online and some data collection tools so questionnaires for data collection both on paper and on a copy software meaning that you can use them to collect data directly on the tablet the software is an open source so it's it's ready for use you can create your own you can create your own survey it's a software that has been developed by the World Bank to which FAO has contributed so I mean it's it's open for use by by any institution or entity that is interested in using the copy software for a digitized data collection the guidelines on the measurement of harvest and post harvest losses have got their own e-learning and there is a forthcoming e-learning that Cristina has already introduced on the food loss index and on the indicators methodology now what do the guidelines for data collection cover in fact they cover a mix of measurement methods and estimation methods and very importantly they do a distinction between the data collection method so a survey and experimental design a measurement method so do you interview or do you scale the product and the estimation methods so do you use a model to do the estimate or do you scale up the results from the sample and the data so you will find a variety of tools and methods that are described with recommendations for every stage of the value chain on which particular methods to use of course we recommend using sample surveys even if it is the most demanding method because sample surveys are representative you can tell they can be representative on a national level and they have a known accuracy so you know how accurate or how accurate the estimate is or what is the error size more importantly sample surveys are really the only way to have a good measure in the case of a traditional value chain where there is a multitude of very small operations expert opinion producers associations can give a very accurate estimate when we are talking about few commercial technicized operators who have the who know their business and who keep very accurate accounts and and who can analyze their process but when it comes to small farmers small transporters and so on and the only way is to do a sample survey with an enumerator that does that does the measurement and we are going to to talk about that also at the very end of the presentation and now but Karola Karola we we need to come to an end because we are at the end I have two more slides come to an end and so okay there it is okay this is the last slide okay okay I'm skipping one slide and so what's what next I mean to to increase the the evidence base in fact AFIL has got these two pronged and collaborative approach to data collection one is really to assist countries in collecting food loss data and one is to assist in countries in estimating losses with a model where the the data is too scarce to to be to be used directly as such but one thing is that of course all the efforts what we really advocate is that data collection efforts should be part of a wider strategy so they should piggyback on existing surveys we offered a methodology to ensure consistency and comparability over time and across countries but the only way to really make this happen is through partnerships at all level so partnerships with the national stakeholders international partnerships across development partners in order to focus maybe on different areas different geographical areas different tracks of the value chain different types of value chain and partnerships with a private sector who has the strongest knowledge especially in the central tracks of the value chain so this is my final point I understand that I went above I'm sorry for the technical problems I had so the the floor is to the 500 yes thank you very much Karola so I will now give the floor to Rosa to answer some of the questions meanwhile Karola look at the questions that were asked during your session because there have been various questions however I I feel the need because I noticed some of the questions to just provide some clarifications first of all for those who are not aware the United Nations have a framework which is called the Sustainable Development Goal Agenda 2030 which consists of a number of indicators and that countries have to collect at national level to be able to using of course the same methodology to be able to do two things one is to compare their value with the other countries number two is also to understand what is the trend for your country so what Karola was what Karola presented is the methodology that is being proposed at international level for all countries to use to measure food loss at national level this methodology and this needs to be clearly spelled out this is not an FAO methodology this methodology has been developed collaboratively with all the countries in the world and has been validated by all the countries because then they're the ones who have to apply it to be able to have a national value for the food index indicator so meanwhile what Rosa presented and there is actually as I was mentioning a knee learning course that covers exactly the how to identify the critical loss points along the food value chains for the different commodities that course is actually very very useful for countries to take decisions and to understand where they have to intervene along the food value chains to reduce these losses so um so these are two aspects of the same issue and this is why it was we designed this this webinar strategically in order in order to cover these aspects of the same issue so now I will give the floor to Rosa you have five minutes maximum to respond to some of the questions of course we will not be able there are more than 500 participants asking questions so we will be answering for five minutes and then some of the questions will be answered afterwards in a word document and both the recording the presentations and and also this document with the answers to the questions will be made available through the FAO e-learning academy where you can always find the information and so now the floor is yours Rosa just to give a few answers to some of the questions you have five minutes thank you okay thank you very much for all of your very interesting questions um I noted quite a few questions for information and I will share with you again the link to the community of practice on food losses and waste because all of the material that we have produced so far is accessible online on the community of practice there's another set of questions that surround the issue of value addition to mangos and certainly yes FAO does support this area of work we didn't go into that specific area today because our focus was more on the the fresh produce of handling but certainly this is an area that FAO addresses other questions that were surrounded the issue of the cold chain versus for example hot water treatment the cold chain is not a substitute for hot water treatment the reason why we apply hot water treatment is to manage the pest and disease infestations the alternative to that if we go into pre-havis what would be looking at bagging of the fruit at a certain stage of their development while they're in the field to prevent the pest infestations and if we looking at the post-havis stage one the other option would be vapor heat treatment but that is a very costly the equipment required for vapor heat treatment is very costly and so to a large extent we still see with the exception of very a few important countries like Japan where they're very very stringent on quarantine issues to a large extent you see you still find that hot water treatment is the more widely used treatment and also so another very interesting question related to the possibility of developing a network creating a network around this the issues discussed here today this is something maybe we could consider a poll to see if there's any interest in moving forward along those lines so it's something that we could explore further if there's interest and see how something like this would work out and then there were questions about standards public standards private standards related to you know what it is that is happening in that in the context of standards and for quality and safety of course if you're going into export markets or supplying specific suppliers like for example supermarkets to a large extent have specific requirements you have the the meeting the GAP standards specific retailers have the specific private standards that have to be met and of course governments also have their requirements this is why a lot of the times you if you're going into international trade cross-border trade there's certain specific quarantine requirements and that these things have to be these requirements have to be adhered to the specific food safety regulations and so on that some of them are also public public sector related others you know the requirements if you are going to supply specific markets or specific buyers with fresh produce then someone asked whether the private sector will invest in supported small holders and yes that's our experience in the Asian region that yes that happens because that's one of the reasons that they're always very much involved we invite them to give presentations so that the small holders get the sense of what it is that the private sector is interested in in procuring and so where they really see an opportunity and I gave an example in my presentation about the case of bananas where there was a private entity who was buying bananas at the field level transporting them to their warehouse and only because they you know if you have bananas over time like the mangoes it's only as they ripen you begin to see the level of compression damage that's a loss for them but when they participated in the training what happens is they realize that if they train this if the training of the small holders they could give them the crates where they could do all of that work at the field level and it benefits both of them because they get a blemish-free banana coming into the supermarkets with a better quality better shelf life better price for them and at the same time the small holders benefit from 40% on average this is what we get for we've seen it in mango chains tomatoes it's approximately 40% increase in terms of the income to them okay um then thank you very much Rosa I would like now to pass on to Karola maybe to answer some of the questions that you believe are relevant for for all participants Karola the floor is yours for five minutes and then we will be closing uh all right let me get back okay right I've been unmuted thank you right well actually there have been a lot of questions and I was trying to group them a little bit okay first of all some questions are on the resources so the material that I have shown is available online you will find in the link the presentation I will add them anyway to the reply the questions and for the material that might not be online please contact me then there was a question on there are there was a question on the boundaries why was harvest loss why were harvest losses excluded from the international index that is because uh we we measure losses as a percentage of production and uh production is measured in agricultural statistics net of harvest losses so one needs to change the production number to do a correct calculation of that percentage and it would be too disruptive of of the time series of the agricultural statistics so it is something that we uh we of course the method is there and at the country level it can be done but at the international level to keep the comparability of the production figures uh we have excluded I mean harvest losses were excluded from the scope of the international indicator retail markets very good point the fact that wet markets play the same role of wholesale and retail of course the the the way the SDG was formulated once it is formulated it is there and it does not really reflect all the realities and there is a fuzziness in the boundaries where does the supply chain stop the same market so we the the methodology had to reflect the the formulation of the indicator uh in uh in countries where retail and wholesale in fact retail and wholesale are so merged uh well the retail market uh losses at the retail market may be incorporated into the food loss index as it is a natural prolongation or or the other way around the european union is incorporating wholesale into into the the food waste index and so into the retail so one had to make choices and then of course there have to be adaptations to the to the to the local situation um why uh so much focus on the primary commodities because when the index attempts at measuring losses as a percentage of production so it becomes commodity specific even if along the supply chain the commodity gets transformed now in fact there is a bit again there is a bit of a fuzzy boundary between losses and waste and the second or third stage of food processing when all the ingredients get mixed and to some extent the food processing is replacing cooking in the household uh so at that point it is even difficult to understand what is the percentage loss of a single component but again because of this clear divide and because the between uh the supply side and the demand side in the SDG formulation and because uh they are they respond to different policy concerns we look uh we bring back all the processed commodities into their primary prevalence and there was a question also on fish why is fish not there fish is there in the methodology in the guidelines it is not there in the database uh because we didn't uh because there is an FAO database on uh on fish loss assessments and um we still need to integrate that one uh into into hours uh you stop me Cristina when five minutes are gone otherwise I no no stop uh we need to stop okay thank you very much Carola actually I'd like to start by thanking the two um experts that we have had the the luck and the pleasure to have uh with us on this food loss webinar I would like to also thank uh Fabio Picinic and Sara Ferrante for the management of the old and Aristide also for the management of the platform and all the logistics behind this event I would like to thank our partners Agrinium and also UNS cap who have helped us to disseminate the information about about the webinar and I would like to thank you all the participants over 510 participants from all over the world who have sent fantastic questions really very interesting questions this is really a wealth to be able to have this interaction with all of you all around the world and we will be uh trying to respond to all these questions because the questions and the answers to the questions it is really extremely valuable to everyone so we will try to develop a document with all uh compiling all of this and sharing it with all of you we really look forward to having you with us in the next webinar we will be informing you about the thematic area meanwhile have a look at the the we are inviting you all to come and have a look at the FAE Learning Academy that offers all of these um e-learning courses on all the thematic areas that we will be covering it's very easy it's e-learning.phow.org thank you very much to all of you for this we really look forward to seeing you very soon with us bye bye thank you Christina thank you to all the speakers uh as said we'll we'll share also the link to the recording in the upcoming days bye bye everybody thanks to everyone