Expert Panel #

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

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The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized United Nations agency leading international efforts to end hunger and improve food security. FAO’s mission is to ensure that all people have regular access to enough high-quality food for active, healthy lives. FAO’s Bioeconomy Team, located within the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment, manages FAO’s corporate priority area on bioeconomy, a cross-cutting programme brining together different technical division. The programme envisions a bioeconomy that balances economic value and social welfare with environmental sustainability for a world free of hunger. Its mission is to scale up the global bioeconomy transition through integrated, evidence-based policies, practical innovations, and strong international partnerships, with a particular focus on supporting SDG 12. FAO helps countries create tailored bioeconomy strategies that optimize biomass use—by making better use of existing resources, tapping into unexploited biomass, and sustainably increasing production where appropriate, including through reducing food loss and waste, valorize agricultural residues, and promote circularity within food systems. By implementing bio-innovations that harness renewable resources for energy, materials, and food, FAO drives sustainable economic growth, fosters rural development, and positions bioeconomy as a critical pathway toward resilience and sustainability.

The FAO Stand will showcase concrete examples of bioeconomy innovations that harness sustainable use of biological resources to empower developing countries to tackle urgent environmental and socio-economic challenges, including innovations to measure and reduce food loss and waste. These initiatives reflect FAO’s holistic bioeconomy approach, focusing on reducing and repurposing food loss and waste, revitalizing traditional knowledge, and transforming agrifood residues into sustainable value chains that enhance environmental resilience, foster socio-economic growth, and strengthen food security.
Visitors will have the opportunity to explore tangible products from several FAO innovative projects. These include black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and nutrient-rich fertilizer from Côte d’Ivoire’s BioDAF initiative, where urban organic waste is transformed into valuable agricultural inputs. Additionally, they’ll encounter fish-skin leather from Cape Verde’s Fish to Fashion project, an initiative empowering women’s cooperatives to convert fish waste into market-ready goods and build new commercial connections. Sustainable banana fiber textiles from Pakistan will showcase how banana stems can be turned into eco-friendly fabrics, providing a bio-based alternative to resource-intensive cotton.
The FAO Food Loss App (FLAPP), a tool developed to accelerate the pace of actions to measure, report, and reduce food losses, through the crowdsourcing of data and the provision of advice to reduce FL in real time will be showcased as well as 3D models of equipment – silos, hot water treatment tanks, solar coolers and dryers, evaporative coolers – designed by FAO and fabricated by artisans in developing economies in Asia and Africa, and their field level application in measurably reducing food losses will also be showcased.

Organizer

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)