The Conservative federal government has been criticized for shifting its approach to foreign aid.
It says it wants to get more bang for its buck spent on foreign assistance.
If so, it would be hard to find a better way to invest than to support efforts to slash the vast quantity of food wasted through inadequate post harvest storage.
In a major rethinking of foreign aid, the Conservatives have decided to roll the Canadian International Development Agency into the Department of Foreign Affairs and to work more closely with the private sector to encourage economic growth, reduce poverty in developing countries and advance Canada’s interests abroad.
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Critics say the policy could lead to handouts to Canadian companies instead of a hand up to the poor in the developing world.
The government disputes that, but when it decided to back out of the United Nation’s Convention to Combat Desertification, it gave critics more ammunition to say the government is harming Canada’s status as a global citizen dedicated to reducing hardship among the world’s poorest.
But prime minister Stephen Harper’s explanation for leaving the organization — that less than one fifth of the $350,000 Canada provided to the convention was used for programming, with the rest going to bureaucratic measures — has resonance with an electorate tired of wasteful government spending.
Few have forgotten the antics of former international co-operation minister Bev Oda, who resigned after revelations about lush spending at an international meeting in London.
In pursuit of more financially effective foreign aid, there might be value in involving business and mobilizing private capital to direct more resources and practicality to the task.
That is the idea behind the Save Food initiative run by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and German trade fair organizer Messe Düsseldorf, which partners with business and non-profit organizations to reduce food loss and waste worldwide.
Many packaging companies are already involved in the project and the giant food company ADM has provided $10 million to create the ADM Institute for the Prevention of Post Harvest Loss at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign.
The FAO estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes of the food produced in the world is lost or wasted every year, or about one-third of what is grown.
A report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on food waste in India said about 21 million tonnes of wheat — the size of Canada’s entire spring wheat crop — is lost each year in that country alone.
The FAO forecasts that by 2050 demand for food will grow by 60 percent. To meet that need, food waste must be reduced.
It not only reduces the food available to eat, it also squanders the inputs — water, nutrients, energy, money — used to produce the crop.
While food loss in the developed world is usually associated with processor and consumer waste, in poor countries losses often are due to inferior harvesting techniques and storage infrastructure.
The need to reduce food waste is on the radar of CIDA, which counts increasing food security as one of its priorities.
But making the issue a priority could allow Canada to rebuild its reputation as an effective provider of aid.
That is particularly true considering there is no shortage of Canadian companies with internationally recognized crop handling and storage expertise, both as grain companies and storage and equipment manufacturers, to have as partners.
Simply preserving what developing world farmers already produce could have a more immediate and important impact on reducing hunger than other efforts that might rely on costly inputs, time consuming research, training and the vagaries of weather.
