Food Loss and Waste Definitions and Measurement Issues: The Case of the Maize Sector in Mozambique

Current estimates point to food loss and waste as costing around $US 900 billion dollars a year. That is equivalent to around one-third of global food production. The magnitude of this valuation, however, is reliant on the effective measurement of the actual amount of food loss and waste. There are various definitions of this problem, which differ in their scope. FAO, FUSION and WRI are the most prominent institutions that have proposed different definitions of food loss and waste. All of these definitions have been at least partially criticized. Nonetheless, FAO’s definition and methodology have been the basis for many studies attempting to quantify food loss and waste. FAO’s methodology is based more on estimation rather than direct measurements. Taking the example of maize in Mozambique, using FAO’s methodology to measure food loss and waste at the farm level seems to provide estimates comparable to the available statistics from the national agricultural surveys. Di rect measurements on the other hand, apart from being costly, seem to suffer from representativeness problems as highlighted by some authors. Also, some of the direct measurement methods proposed by some authors seem to look at food loss and waste as a static problem, rather than a dynamic problem that evolves over time. Regardless of the level where the problem of food loss and waste occurs (upper or lower end of supply chains), it results in a deadweight loss for society. That is demonstrated by a Marshallian supply and demand diagram.