One Third of Global Food Production is Lost on the Way, How to Feed 8 Billion Humans?

A third of the planet’s food is lost between the farm and our plates. If this situation persists, it will be impossible to feed 8 billion human beings in 2025. Swiss EPFL's creative thinking platform “Fusebox” has a new challenge for students, alumni and third parties. Starting March 4, people can share their idea for reducing food waste by participating in the contest – and might take home CHF 10,000 in prize money.

A third of the world’s food supply never makes its way into human stomachs. Losses and waste occur all along the production chain, from farms to households. If this situation persists, arable land will not be able to support the 8 billion humans that will populate the Earth by the year 2025.

From farm to plate the food chain is long and fraught with difficulties. Conditioning, storage, transport, processing of agricultural commodities into food products, management of the flow between suppliers and consumers via retailers – these are some of the stages on a journey in which innovation is necessary in order to reduce loss. How can storage be improved? Will new information technologies allow us to manage stocks better? How can we re-value losses? How can we reduce the amount of transport needed or encourage more local production and consumption?

The family-run Bühler Group, a major supplier of food processing solutions, soon to be present in EPFL’s Innovation Park, would like to innovate and re-think the food value chain to solve this pressing problem. At the end of the online Fusebox challenge, the best “ideators” will be invited to company headquarters in Uzwil to participate in a workshop that has a CHF 10,000 prize at stake. Fusebox has given itself a facelift for the occasion, with a more engaging interface.

Five times the surface of India
Losses all along the value chain lead to the disappearance of a third of all the food that is produced agriculturally in the world. According to estimates done by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the amount of arable land needed to produce this food would be five times the size of India. Every year 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted – enough to feed 3.5 billion people. Shocked by these numbers? Well, the ball is in your court now. From March 4 – March 21, fusebox.epfl.ch is open to your ideas for solutions to the problems plaguing the global food chain.