The House of Lords European Union (EU) Select Committee last week (22 July) formally issued the first ever ‘Green Card’, calling on the European Commission (EC) to take action to combat food waste.
The Green Card is a new initiative that enables the parliaments of EU member states to join together to make proposals to the European Commission, with the intention of influencing policy development.
In the first such proposal, Lord Boswell of Aynho, Chairman of the House of Lords EU Select Committee, and 15 other chairpersons of committees of EU national parliaments sent a letter to EC President Jean-Claude Juncker to call for a more strategic approach to food waste reduction when tabling a new Circular Economy Package.
The letter, ‘Food waste: a proposal by national parliaments to the European Commission’, states: ‘89 million tonnes of food are wasted each year in the EU, a figure which could rise to approximately 126 million tonnes by 2020 if no action is taken… Tackling food waste is a multi-faceted challenge. Some excellent work is being undertaken at national level, and some collaborative work between EU member states, but there is substantial room for improvement.’
As such, it sets out the following recommendations to be implemented as part of a more overarching strategy, coordinated at EU-level to complement the work currently being done to reduce food waste at a national level:
- produce EU food donation guidelines where ‘unsold food should – in the first instance – be redistributed for charitable purposes’;
- create an EU co-ordination mechanism to support the sharing of best practices including: ‘research and innovation, promoting high value use of food waste and practical ways to encourage consumers and industry to prevent and reduce food-waste’;
- monitor business-to-business cross-border food supply chain with the goal of ‘avoiding unfair practices that lead to the wastage of food’;
- provide recommendations on the definition of food waste and data collection from the EC, building on the work of the EU-wide project Food Use for Social Innovation by Optimising Waste Prevention Strategies (FUSIONS); and
- establish a horizontal working group within the EC to ‘assess the consideration of food waste within policy making’.
The 16 parliaments and chambers that signed the letter are:
- Bulgaria (National Assembly)
- Croatia (Croatian Parliament)
- Cyprus (House of Representatives)
- Czech Republic (Chamber of Deputies
- France (Assemblée Nationale)
- France (Sénat)
- Hungary (National Assembly)
- Italy (Senate)
- Latvia (Saeima)
- Lithuania (Seimas)
- Luxembourg (Chamber of Deputies)
- Malta (House of Representatives)
- The Netherlands (Tweede Kamer)
- Portugal (Assembleia da República)
- Slovakia (National Council)
- United Kingdom (House of Lords)
The European Union in coming under increasing pressure to act on food waste, particularly in light of recent French legislative changes to fine large supermarkets that do not donate unsold foods to charity.
Read the full letter to Jean-Claude Juncker.
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