By uniting stakeholders around common goals, a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) aims to overcome challenges of food system fragmentation.
The global food system is a complex web of stakeholders and activities involved in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal of food products. Food loss and waste are problems emerging across the whole system, across multiple stakeholders, often with separation between the root cause of the waste and the supply chain stage in which it arises. Due to this complex and interlinked nature, collaborative action is fundamental to the delivery of SDG 12.3 and the systemic changes required throughout the global food system.
This section details one approach that has been shown to help drive food waste reduction across the entire food supply chain: public-private partnerships. A public-private partnership (PPP), sometimes known as a “voluntary agreement,” is about working together to deliver a shared goal. In tackling food loss and waste, this means a “collaboratively agreed, self-determined ‘pact’ or agreement to take action on food waste generated at different stages of the food system”. This involves bringing together stakeholders either across the whole food supply chain, or within a particular sector or stage of the supply chain. By uniting stakeholders around common goals, a PPP aims to overcome challenges of food system fragmentation. The establishment of a PPP is an explicit recognition that we all have a role to play in food loss and waste reduction: from international organisations and national governments through to large and small businesses all the way to consumers. This is an approach that is already operating across the globe and having meaningful impacts on food waste reduction, tackling food insecurity and reducing costs
