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New Issue Brief Calls for Governments to Tackle Food Loss Where It Starts: On the Farm

May 18, 2026

Nearly a third of all food produced globally never reaches a plate. While much of the policy conversation around food loss and waste has focused on retail and consumer behavior, a striking and under-addressed share of that loss happens long before food ever reaches a store shelf—at the farm stage. An estimated 1.2 billion tonnes of food is lost each year at the point of production, accounting for approximately 14% of all food grown worldwide. That is more food than is lost at the retail and consumer levels combined.

The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) and The Global FoodBanking Network released a new issue brief Promoting Food Donation: On-Farm Food Loss & Agricultural Recovery, that confronts this gap head-on. The brief maps the problem, identifies the policy barriers keeping farmers from recovering and donating surplus food, and offers nine concrete recommendations for governments around the world, with best practice examples.

On-Farm Loss Has Been Overlooked with Major Climate Consequences

On-farm food loss is not a simple problem. It results from a complex interplay of climate pressures, inadequate cold chain infrastructure, cosmetic standards imposed by buyers, labor shortages, market volatility, and a basic lack of economic incentive for farmers to recover surplus rather than leave it in the field. A landmark 2019 analysis of 123 farms in California found that, on average, 33% of edible crops went unharvested, with some fields seeing losses exceeding 50%.

Farm-stage food loss accounts for 2.2 gigatonnes of CO₂e annually, or nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and squanders the land, water, and labor that went into growing that food in the first place. Unlike food sent to landfills, which generates methane during decomposition, on-farm loss contributes to emissions primarily through the carbon footprint of wasted agricultural inputs.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Global Farm Loss Tool, which directly informed this brief, documented consistent patterns of loss exceeding 30% across pilot farms in Colombia, Costa Rica, and the United States, underscoring both the scale of the opportunity and the need for better data collection at the farm stage.

Despite the scale of the problem, on-farm food loss often receives less attention in national food loss and waste strategies than loss occurring at the retail and consumer stages. The brief explores this gap and its implications for food security, climate goals, and farmer livelihoods, and identifies solutions and opportunities for governments.

What Good Policy Looks Like in Practice

The brief draws on examples from more than a dozen countries to illustrate what effective on-farm food loss policy can look like.

For example, Australia offers a model for how a national food waste strategy can explicitly include the agricultural production stage. Its National Food Waste Strategy sets sector-specific reduction targets and supports a dedicated Horticulture Sector Action Plan that connects producers directly to food recovery partners, demonstrating that holistic national strategies can address loss at every link in the supply chain, not just the ones most visible to consumers.

Colombia shows how tax policy can be a powerful lever for agricultural recovery. In 2024, the country enacted Ley 2380 de 2024, significantly expanding its food donation framework. The law increases the tax credit value for donated food from 25% to 37%, explicitly covers fresh and perishable agricultural products, and allows businesses to claim a credit for transportation costs associated with delivering donated food, directly targeting one of the most significant economic barriers for producers to recover and donate food.

These examples and others shared in the issue brief show that effective approaches to on-farm food loss and recovery already exist in practice and offer replicable models for governments looking to strengthen their own frameworks.

Nine Recommendations for Governments

The brief presents nine recommendations covering the full range of on-farm food loss policy, from prevention to recovery:

  1. Include on-farm and postharvest loss in national FLW strategies with measurable targets, dedicated funding, and producer engagement built in from the start
  2. Incentivize on-farm donation with tax policy by prioritizing credits over deductions, covering harvest and transport costs, and standardizing valuation methods
  3. Liaise between farms and food recovery organizations, covering operational costs of agricultural recovery directly, embedding rescued produce into social support systems, and using direct procurement models to purchase surplus from farmers
  4. Fund grants for recovery infrastructure like cold storage, last-mile refrigerated transport, and aggregation facilities that make donation viable for producers
  5. Prioritize and implement farmer education through regional training hubs, national donation guidance, and integration of food loss prevention into existing certification programs
  6. Support third-party gleaning by nonprofit organizations with clear liability protections, dedicated funding, and formal recognition in national FLW strategies
  7. Support market development for upcycled foods such as using public procurement preferences, co-investment for small producers, and recognition of third-party certification schemes
  8. Allow food scraps for animal feed and other circular uses, clarify feed safety regulations, capital support for anaerobic digestion facilities, and integration into national FLW frameworks
  9. Create surplus exchange and alternative market access programs, enabling legal frameworks for barter systems, direct farm-to-consumer marketplaces, and input exchange programs that give surplus food a tangible value

GFN member food banks are already engaged in agricultural recovery, working directly with producers, coordinating gleaning operations, and redirecting surplus crops to communities in need. Scaling these efforts requires policy environments that make recovery economically viable for farmers, not just logistically possible for food banks.

This brief is intended to serve as a useful resource for food recovery organizations, policymakers, and governments working to strengthen agricultural recovery frameworks and advance progress toward SDG 12.3.