A planet to feed
© photos.com
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. “Fusebox” has a new challenge for you. Starting March 4, you can share your idea for reducing food waste by participating in the contest – and you might take home CHF 10,000 in prize money.
For its second challenge, “Fusebox,” EPFL’s creative thinking platform, is tackling a global problem. In partnership with the Bühler Group and the Junior Enterprises of EPFL and ETH Zurich, you’re invited to come up with ideas for limiting the losses and waste that occur between the field and consumers.
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.
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. This challenge will be an opportunity to bring EPFL and ETH Zurich together, and because of this the contest will be run in English.
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?
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.