Economy-wide Impacts of Food Waste Reduction: A General Equilibrium Approach

Food waste is increasingly recognized as an important factor threatening not only food security, but as well several dimensions of sustainability of the food system. However most of the studies in the literature focus on technological aspects and ignore the costs of options to reduce food waste. In this study we develop a framework to analyse the effects of food waste reduction in a CGE model to reflect associated costs across sectors and agents. Our results suggest that enforced food waste reduction, e.g. by regularity measures such as standards, may cause severe loss of competitiveness for agriculture and food production.JRC.J.4-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Econom