Food losses and waste have recently been given very high visibility, since the FAO estimates that about 1.3 billion tonnes or a third of all food produced are lost (Gustavsson et al., 2011). Recent reports (Foresight, 2011; Gustavsson et al., 2011) have highlighted the need to reduce them globally to improve food security (HLPE, 2011; FAO, 2012a, b) and to reduce the environmental impact of food systems (FAO, 2012a, b; HLPE, 2012; UNEP 2012a, b). An amount of 1.3 billion tonnes of wasted food can help meet the food needs of over 3 billion people. FAO launched the Save Food Initiative in 2011 to accelerate progress in ending avoidable waste. Food losses and waste were much talked about during the preparation for the Rio+20 Conference (FAO, 2012a, b), which linked the reduction of food losses and waste to the issue of more sustainable food systems and security.

The Zero Hunger challenge launched in 2012 by the Secretary General of the United Nations during the Rio Conference integrates a zero food loss and waste challenge and a 100 per cent sustainable food systems challenge. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has requested its High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) for Food Security and Nutrition, which I have the privilege to chair, to prepare, for 2014, a report on food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems.

For those who are working for a long time on food security issues, the need for eliminating food losses and waste is an old topic. Why then is there such widespread interest now?

I think there are many reasons for this. The first is probably that with the food price crisis in 2008 the whole world has realized that there are still almost a billion hungry people and 2 billion malnourished people, many of them being pregnant women. Maternal and foetal under-nutrition lead to newborn children having LBW and such children suffer from several handicaps in later life, including impaired cognitive ability.

With the onset of the era of climate change, there are concerns regarding India's capacity to sustain a growing demand for food, driven by population and income growth and by a shift towards diets richer in animal products. FAO estimates that food production will have to increase by 60 per cent towards 2050 to satisfy the growing demand (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012).