The world set out to halve food loss. The number moved the other way.

In 2015, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals, the world agreed to halve food loss and waste by 2030. FAO built an index to track the first half of that promise, the Food Loss Index, which measures the share of food lost between the field and the shop. When monitoring began in 2015, the world lost 13.0 percent of its food before it ever reached retail. The latest estimate, for 2023, is 13.3 percent. In FAO's own words, the world has made no apparent progress in reducing food losses since 2015.¹

The regional picture is the part worth sitting with. Northern America and Europe lose the least, at 10.0 percent, up from 9.4 percent in 2015. Eastern and South-eastern Asia sits at 13.9 percent, up from 13.8. Sub-Saharan Africa loses the most of any region, 23.0 percent, up from 22.1. Every region with a verified start and end point moved the wrong way. This is not a story of one place falling behind. It is a target the whole world is missing at once, and the region with the least room to spare is missing it by the most.

It is worth being precise about what this number is, and what it is not. The Food Loss Index measures losses from production up to, and not including, retail, across a basket of ten commodity groups. It is not a storage figure and it is not a maize figure. Loss rates differ sharply by commodity: cereals and pulses are the least lost group globally, at 8.4 percent, while fruit and vegetables lose the most, at 25.4 percent.¹ A grain business quoting the regional 23.0 percent owes its readers that disclosure, so here it is in ours.

Why does the distinction between growing food and keeping food matter? Because food security is usually funded, measured and celebrated as a production question. Seed programmes, fertiliser support, extension services and rainfall all act on the size of the harvest. The Food Loss Index measures something else entirely: what happens to the harvest after the field has done its work.

A larger harvest is a production achievement. Food on a plate in February is an infrastructure achievement. A country can succeed at the first and remain exposed on the second.

The index suggests that is exactly what much of the world is doing. FAO attributes these persistently high loss rates to systemic constraints in post-harvest infrastructure and supply chains, not to how the crop was grown.¹ The problem, in other words, begins after the harvest ends.

Our own reading, held as a reading rather than a proven result: the loss rate is stubborn because it falls between institutions. Extension services support the planting. Buyers arrive at the market. The months in between, when grain sits in sacks in the house, moves on bad roads, or waits for a buyer who may not come, belong to the farmer alone, and very little in the system is funded to be there with them. An indicator that no single institution owns is an indicator that does not move.

What an infrastructure answer looks like is unglamorous: storage close to the farm, aggregation that shortens the journey between harvest and buyer, and records that make the crop visible to the market before it deteriorates. That is the layer where we work, with smallholder farmers in the Eastern Province of Zambia, and we are far too small to be the answer to a continental number. But a figure that has not fallen in eight years is not waiting on better farming. It is waiting on the layer between the field and the shop.