With 2024 hindsight and the perspective of the Green Deal, it is now quite easy to blame the CAP for the massive food waste, perpetrated over decades. Indeed, food losses and wastage have been a major concern in the critical review of the CAP mechanisms – from the threshold price to the allocation of product quotas – and are among the main reasons for the CAP’s historical reforms.
Inspired by the ambition to provide a meaningful contribution to the current debate on waste, this panel is part of a research track launched in Romania in September 2023, which meant to further explore food losses and wastage along past food supply chains in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Our joint effort aims to investigate historical food inefficiencies, shedding light on food waste generated by public institutions rather than by households. Our overview will therefore include all European countries since the 1960s, both those governed and regulated by the CAP and those where food waste was actually generated due to the backlash of the CAP as well as its side effects on other countries (i.e. Western European countries kept out of the CAP area, Eastern European countries and non-EU countries).

Besides ridding the concept of waste of its emotional and moral components, we propose to understand food waste on the basis of the socio-economic functions it actually performed. Set against a different background, food waste is first and foremost a dynamic phenomenon.
We focus on those norms and public policies that have tolerated – but more often generated – food waste as a reasonable toll paid in the name of a set of shared priorities. These priorities have changed over time, ranging from food security and landscape regeneration to rural employment and eco-system services. On the one hand, the list of these different priorities outlines a working grid that provides us with a new taxonomy of food waste. On the other, it allows us to investigate the phenomenon through a purely economic lens, replacing the concept of waste with that of ‘inefficiency’, corresponding to the loss of edible mass, money and/or natural resources spent to produce it. In both cases, the contributions will shed new light on the current commonplace of food waste, typically read as an irrational public enemy, here seen as part of a broader common profitability, in particular due to the priorities set by European legislation and its governance.

All the proposals included in this panel will contribute to a new understanding of food waste through the historical perspective. While not exhaustive, the list of relevant research strands includes:

• Studies on inefficiencies (both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective) in each individual food supply chain within a given regional or national context, as well as through a comparative perspective between different contexts.
• Assessment of the policies applied to agri-food products and past trade of any European country (directly and indirectly affected by the CAP).
• Survey and data series on waste, where historical series are available.
• Diachronic analysis of agri-food regulations, notably CAP regulations, related to food waste and losses.
• Recycling and upcycling strategies adopted over time to overcome food inefficiencies
• Development of public and media rhetoric as well as discourse on institutional food waste

Besides the organizers, the list of the contributors so far has included: Paolo Tedeschi [Università di Milano-Bicocca] and Fernando Collantes [Universidad de Oviedo].
Paper proposals [up to max 200 words] must be sent, together with a short proponent’s CV, to laura.prosperi@unimib.it and andreamaria.locatelli@unicatt.it by 28 February 2024.

Organizers

Laura Prosperi [Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca]
Andrea Maria Locatelli [Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Milano]
Corinne Marache [Université Bordeaux Montaigne]
Yves Segers [KuLeuven, Director Center for Agrarian History]