The Biden-Harris Administration Just Released the Final White House Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics.

The Biden-Harris Administration Just Released the Final White House Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics. 

Heres Whats New, Whats Promising, and What Falls Short. 

By Larkin Gallup

On June 12th, at the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit in Baltimore, US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the release of the long-anticipated White House National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics. The strategy, born from an interagency agreement between the US Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration, identifies actions and sets priorities to achieve the United Statess goal of reducing food loss and waste by 50% by 2030. 

The strategy works to achieve four objectives: 

• Prevent food loss

• Prevent food waste

• Increase the recycling rate for all organic waste

• Support policies that incentivize and encourage the prevention of food loss and waste and organics recycling. 

Before we jump into whats included in the strategy (and whats not,) lets take a second to trace our path to its release. This National Strategy began in 2022 with the announcement of the White House National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health (the first in over 50 years!) Farmlink hosted a listening session for the conference, engaging stakeholders across the food rescue and hunger-fighting space to inform the ensuing strategy, which included a key deliverable to create another separate strategy to address food loss and waste to combat hunger. 

Aligned with the national goal to reduce food loss and waste by 50% by 2030, the three agencies released a draft National Strategy in December 2023 for a two-month public comment period. During that time, Farmlink contributed to comments sent in by the Zero Food Waste Coalition as well as submitted our own comments. We urged the agencies to emphasize the hunger-fighting and environmental co-benefits of reducing food loss and waste, especially in the context of the Hunger, Nutrition, and Health parent National Strategy. Our comments also strongly recommended that food rescue organizations like Farmlink be called on as thought and implementation partners throughout the strategy, from expanding the network of recipients of surplus food to designing solutions to pre-retail food loss. 

That brings us to mid-June when the White House officially released the final draft of the strategyan important elevation of the strategy and its priorities. Weve sifted through the National Strategy to find whats new in the final version, what disappeared between drafts, and how the strategic actions will be funded (and just how feasible they are.) Heres a detailed breakdown of exactly what you need to know about the White House National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics.

Whats new and exciting?

Lets start with whats new: One of the most noticeable changes is also one of the smallest: the titles of Objectives 1 and 2, which used to be Prevent Food Loss Where Possible and Prevent Food Waste Where Possible (respectively), are now Prevent Food Loss and Prevent Food Waste. While small, this edit signals a more substantial commitment to achieving a 50% reduction in FLW by identifying existing opportunities for action and creating new ones. 

How Farmlinks comments were incorporated into the National Strategy:

We were especially excited to see that, throughout the strategy, the agencies included food recovery nonprofits as solution-makers. In particular, food recovery nonprofits are highlighted as ways to improve food and nutrition security for Americans and increase the recovery and donation rate of food. Nonprofits are also increasingly included in the public-private partnerships that the strategy identifies as crucial to identifying FLW solutions throughout the supply chain. 

Its also important to point out that many definitions have been clarified, making the strategy more accurate and effective. The definition were most excited about is a slight tweak to organics recycling solutions: the allusion to organics recycling solutions that generate heat that can be captured and used to produce electricity or fuel has been removed. It was critical for us to point out through our comments on the draft strategy the incredibly dangerous and unjust impacts of waste incineration in America and urge the agencies to remove it as a solution. Were celebrating its removal as a huge win for climate justice and for the fight against incineration that too often occurs in under-resourced communities and communities of color. 

Another win for food donation and climate justice was the use of the EPAs recently released Wasted Food Scale as a guiding measure to determine strategic actions and priorities. For those unfamiliar, the Wasted Food Scale ranks all food loss and waste pathways based on their environmental impacts, with prevention and then donation as the most environmentally friendly and preferred pathways and landfilling and incineration as the least preferable pathways. 

Farmlinks comments included many recommendations to use the Wasted Food Scale to ensure that food donation is the top priority where possible and that incineration is never a recommended pathway. By explicitly following the Wasted Food Scale, the National Strategy can better emphasize and achieve the hunger-fighting and environmental co-benefits of reducing FLW.

Heres whats exciting: The new National Strategy also contains plenty of plans, definitions, and other inclusions that were excited about here at Farmlink. The agencies clarified the definitions of food loss and food waste while adding four terms to the Glossary: food security, food donation, indigenous food sovereignty, and nutrition security. These terms all represent tangible goals that Farmlink is working every day to elevate and achieve, and their explicit inclusion in the strategy opens the door for more meaningful action and funding to follow. A great example is the new emphasis on food sovereignty and cultural appropriateness, especially when working with Tribal Nations and indigenous communities. Not only is Indigenous food sovereignty utilized as an example to guide programs that are newly focusing on the cultural appropriateness of donated food, but the strategys early acknowledgment of environmental justice challenges is also influenced by the goal.

In addition to the four objectives, the National Strategy also sets guiding goals, one of which is understanding what makes achieving food security difficult for environmental justice and indigenous communities. It states that more equitable outcomes depend on identifying and overcoming these barriers, and the agencies newly acknowledged that indigenous communities tend to be located in food deserts, where there is little accessible fresh food and lacking food system infrastructure. While acknowledging food deserts does little in itself, it is a critical first step to identifying where barriers lie along racial and socioeconomic lines that can then be addressed through future actions.

Each of the four objectives also contained important changes to consider:

                 Objective 1: Prevent food loss.

Objective 1 engages with wasted food before the retail level, mainly incorporating USDA and EPA actions to build out food storage infrastructure, increase food donation, and invest in research to prevent food loss at the packaging and transportation level. The most important inclusion in Objective 1 was an added paragraph spotlighting Section 32 as a critical part of the nations food safety net. Section 32, a longstanding part of the 1935 Agricultural Adjustment Act (one of the first Farm Bills), uses agricultural customs receipts to fund the large-scale purchase of surplus produce from farmers and its transportation to hunger-fighting charities, schools, and other recipients nationwide. This program keeps millions of pounds of produce out of landfills each year, compensates farmers for their work, and fights food insecurity. Its inclusion as a food loss solution is critical to minimizing on-farm food loss while supporting farmers and reducing hunger. Objective 1 also indicates that the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) data can be used to identify points of surplus, an important expansion of current methods. Still, we will continue advocating for Farmlink and other food rescue organizations with existing, diverse networks of farmers and other food suppliers to be incorporated at a national level to better identify and address points of surplus food.

                 Objective 2: Prevent food waste by increasing food rescue and donation with charitable food distribution.

                                 Objective 2 highlights actions and priorities to prevent food waste at the retail, restaurant, and household levels, namely a new EPA-funded household food waste prevention campaign and collaborations with the private sector to identify potential solutions. The most important changes to Objective 2 include greater detail into the new household food waste prevention campaign (though we are still missing ideas as to how it will be funded,) including a 2.5 million dollar investment of USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture funds to measure the effectiveness of food waste prevention messaging. USDA, EPA, and FDA have also officially renewed an interagency agreement with the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, representing three major sectors of the supply chain- food manufacturing, retail, and restaurant and food service.

Farmlink is particularly excited about a new prioritization within Objective 2: All projects aimed at increasing food rescue and donation should assess the quality, nutrition and appropriateness of the food being rescued, not just the quantity (e.g., consistent with Indigenous food sovereignty). Since Farmlinks founding, one of our core values has been to prioritize and maintain dignity associated with charitable food distribution, and a new emphasis on quality, nutrition, and appropriateness, especially in terms of indigenous food sovereignty, is a critical step to ensuring that the strategy is fighting hunger in an equitable, open-minded, and just way.

Objective 2 also now has the EPA's commitment to use life cycle assessment techniques to evaluate food waste prevention strategies, the results of which will inform consumer campaigns and incentives. They have also committed to refining and expanding food donation and recovery infrastructure through the Excess Food Opportunities Map. Farmlink will continue to advocate for the inclusion of food rescue organizations with existing networks and relationships to help expand these tools.                

                 Objective 3: Increase the recycling rate for all organic waste

                                 Objective 3 centrally works to improve the rate of composting, anaerobic digestion, and other organic waste recycling options, and the final strategy added a new focus on preventing contaminants in the organic waste stream. Though Objective 3 is least directly relevant to food donation and rescue organizations, it contains key updates. Most notably, EPA has committed to further evaluating the environmental impacts of all food waste pathways on the Wasted Food Scale, something Farmlink has advocated for to better understand the environmental impacts of food waste and, more importantly, the potential of reducing food loss and waste as a climate solution. Farmlink also specifically urged the EPA to update the WARM model, which quantifies the emissions associated with landfilling food with the latest data, and we are excited to see that they have committed to regular updates.
               

                 Objective 4: Support policies that incentivize prevention of food loss and waste and organics recycling

                  This objective works to create the conditions in which food loss and waste and organics recycling solutions can occur, from the local to the federal level. The agencies commit to knowledge and resource sharing, though there are few specifics about financial support, if any. In particular, federal support for state, local, and Tribal governments is highlighted in the final strategy, and we are happy to see that the agencies will be celebrating strong food loss and waste action at the state level as an example for local governments and federal government action. We continue to celebrate the use of the EPAs Wasted Food Scale, particularly the newly added strategic action for the EPA to advise state and local governments to adopt recommendations from the Wasted Food Scale.

These changes are great. But hows it all going to be funded?

During the comment process, Farmlink, as well as other food rescue organizations and coalitions, raised critical questions about how the strategy would be funded and, as a result, which measures are feasible. In particular, we hoped for more clarity beyond the drafts statement that the USDA would use American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act funds and the EPA would use Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds. Of the 86 programs or initiatives reviewed in the final strategy, only 15 are completely new programs announced in the strategy.

The other 71 are existing programs or initiatives that either already have a food loss and waste focus or that the national strategy has repackaged as food loss and waste solutions. While we had hopes of new, innovative programs being included in the strategy, the good news with these 71 programs is that most, if not all, are already funded, meaning that they are not reliant on an increasingly turbulent Congress for implementation. Of the 15 new programs, which included the EPAs new consumer education campaign and several new cooperative agreements with land-grant universities, only 2 had specific funding mechanisms. It has become increasingly clear that food rescue organizations and other stakeholders in the food and agriculture space should not consider this strategy as a new rollout of FLW solutions, programs, and funding but rather as an evaluation of the current resources and solutions and how each can be most effectively utilized to achieve the strategys goals. In particular, the framing of many of USDAs programs as FLW solutions offers opportunities to utilize existing funding, data, and infrastructure to solve one of the United Statess most pressing problems.

Whats next?

Now that we have the strategy, its time to truly take advantage of the opportunities it presents. In the immediate future at Farmlink, were excited to continue optimizing Section 32 as a critical on-farm food loss solution as we anticipate significant surplus recoveries in the fall. As we move forward, we continue to advocate for dignity with food distribution, emphasizing cultural appropriateness and quality in every pound of food we rescue. As outlined in our comments, food rescue organizations are critical stakeholders and thought partners for the agencies. Our inclusion in the strategy as such is an opportunity we are taking full advantage of to help guide federal action to support farmers, feed communities, and heal the planet.