Plan for the prevention and reduction of food waste of the Republic of Croatia 2019-2022.

This publication, including the adopting Regulation, providers for the complete text of the Croatian national Plan for the prevention and reduction of food waste, intended for the programmed period from 2019 until the year 2022.
This Plan highlights the need to prevent and reduce food waste while ensuring food security, as a subject of increasing public interest. The resulting food loss is an undesirable occurrence for ethical, economic and environmental reasons, and most importantly, for ensuring that food is sufficient for entire population. In order to sensitize the public on promoting food donation and at the same time preventing poverty, it is necessary to carry out a national campaign that would result in social awareness and the need to redistribute excess food to the needy. The subject activity will be focused primarily on food business operators, given their key role in the food donation system, but not thereby diminishing the role of the general public or individual as a member of society. European Assistance for the Most Dependent Fund (FEAD) funding contributes to poverty reduction, especially severe poverty such as child poverty, homelessness and food shortages. Through FEAD, it is possible to provide non-financial assistance to the most deprived persons, such as food and basic material assistance, and social inclusion activities aimed at the most deprived persons.
The main objective of this Plan is to contribute to the achievement of the European Union and United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with the associated Sustainable Development Goals, specifically Objective 12.3. on responsible production and consumption with specific goals of reducing food waste per capita by half at retail and consumer levels and reducing food losses along the entire production and supply chain. These objectives shall be achieved through the identification and implementation of key measures that will act to prevent and reduce the generation of food waste along the entire food chain. The implementation of such measures and activities partly contributes to the achievement of the objective of the aforementioned Agenda 2: "Eradicating Hunger".
The Plan and its programmed activities are based on specific analysis of key measures and stakeholders, and through benchmarks for action that closely regards the: improvement of legislative framework, including education and guidance, aimed at clarifying provisions and facilitate the process of food donation; contribute to facilitating communication among stakeholders of the food donation system; preparation of the Feasibility Study of the Food Bank in the Republic of Croatia and, depending on the results of the Study, networking of target groups in order to initiate further activities; encouragement of better use of European Union funds in the field of food waste prevention and food donation; coordinated action towards food producers, distributors, traders, hospitality sector and institutional kitchens through the development of sector guides, voluntary agreements on food waste reduction, food donation and motivation through the award of special recognition for foremost examples of good practice in food waste prevention; establishment of a Digital Platform for sharing experiences, media campaign, written brochures through which stakeholder education will be conducted, directly and indirectly acting towards the end consumer in the form of raising awareness of food waste issues and understanding the date of expiry on food; education of pre-school and school-age children and professional training of educational staff, and active and continuous monitoring of the impact indicators of measures envisaged by this Plan. The Ministry of Agriculture will support the continued development of research work and the improvement of new technologies and innovative solutions, because only research work can lead to new innovative solutions that can be implemented for the common purpose of reducing the generation of food waste. To this end, certain financial resources will be provided which, according to predefined criteria, will be allocated to projects that will contribute most to solving the problem of prevention and reduction of food waste generation.
See the end of this publication, containing Table (1) on the overview of measures and activities divided by years; Table (2) containing the summary of estimated required financial resources per each year of the Plan; and Table (3) containing the summary of estimated financial resources required for each listed measure of the Plan.