Food to feed one billion people lost owing to lack of proper cold chains
16 October 2023
Online - About 25 percent of the vaccines and 12 percent of the total food produced - enough to feed one billion people - were lost owing to the lack of proper cold chains, said Toby Peters, Professor in Cold economy from the University of Birmingham.
Giving his keynote address at the Green Cooling Summit 2023, he said that providing the 500 million small holder farmers with sustainable and equitable cold-chain solutions was a crucial step in addressing the major global challenges including food insecurity, poverty, inequality and climate change.
The summit was organized by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GIZ (German Development Agency) Proklima and the German Environment Agency (UBA) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for the Environment and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“One of the priorities of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is ending hunger. UNIDO seeks to advance creative cooling solutions in the developing countries with technologies that are affordable and sustainable to reduce food wastage,” said Ole Nielsen, Chief of UNIDO’s Montreal Protocol Division.
He was speaking at a session on “Policy approaches to advance green cooling along the cold chain.” Nielsen said that the current Multilateral Fund (MLF) framework supports manufacturing and service sectors while many existing cold chain applications fall outside these, namely in the so-called ‘assembly sector’. “Addressing the assembly sector could be a significant factor in the phase down of Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and our fight against climate change, however more data needs to be collected,” he opined.
Dirk Messner, President of the German Environment Agency, in his pre-recorded welcome address, called upon the delegates to join hands in addressing the climate challenges. The two-day summit brought together a diverse range of experts from industry, academia, and government to explore the latest technologies and practices to make the cold chain more sustainable and climate-friendly.
Further Information:
Ole Nielsen
Chief