Food–Mobility–Waste Interconnections within India’s Food System: Integrating Evidence and Governance Mechanisms for Environmental Sustainability
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Abstract
India's expanding food system, rising mobility, and thereupon growing environmental pressures need greater attention towards interrelationships among food movement, consumption, food waste and transportation-related pollution. Food waste of 55kgs/person/year and associated transportation air pollution are major concerns as these relate to resource use, efficiency and environmental sustainability. However, food waste and vehicular emissions are usually explored through distinct institutional and academic settings though they intertwine and are inextricably bound in everyday food system operations and environmental-health outcomes.
This study presents an adapted Indian contextualized analytical framework incorporating food system processes, mobility of food, mobility of consumer in food purchasing, pathways and destinations of surplus and waste of food, mobility of waste, and end-environmental impact. Relying on Indian evidences and related governance processes, the study separates governance from compliance and elaborates their cross-cutting importance to facilitate the translation of standards and policies to environmental performance. The framework also categorizes the food waste as decision points where safe surplus food may be facilitated to be retained and redistributed or where inevitable waste is managed in separate way, Collection, Recovery, Treatment and Final disposal.
In its broad intent, the paper does achieve its core claim; reframe food, mobility and waste as mutually integrated domains of environmental responsibility, rather than individually examined systems as hitherto. The framework described serves as a launching pad for evidence-based governance, compliance behaviour, responsible actions and closed-loop resources and outlines propositions for the future empirical investigation of diverse rural and urban India.
Ultimately, a sustainable future may depend not only on producing and moving more resources efficiently, but on ensuring that the food humanity produces, the mobility it creates, and the waste it generates are governed as one interconnected responsibility...
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