India and Japan should expand their trade talks to address food waste, leveraging Japan's success in halving food loss by 2023.
By adopting tailored strategies like food banks and public campaigns, India can tackle its significant food insecurity while fostering a sustainable partnership with Japan that aligns with global climate and hunger goals.
Learning from Japan's policies and cultural practices, India can build a robust food redistribution system, turning surplus into sustenance and creating a model for sustainable development and bilateral cooperation.
As India and Japan deepen their economic ties, they should also explore co-operation on reducing food waste. Such a partnership could extend beyond investment and trade to encompass shared institutional and social priorities.
According to the UN Environment Programme’s “Food Waste Index Report 2024”, India generates an estimated 78 million-80 million tonnes of food waste a year, worth roughly ₹1.55 lakh crore. Yet millions remain undernourished. The 2025 Global Hunger Index ranked India 102nd out of 123 countries, with a score of 25.8, placing it in the “serious” hunger category. Its child-wasting rate, at 18.7 per cent, was the second-highest among the countries assessed. Food poverty in India has been significant despite our GDP increasing over the years.
By contrast, Japan has already met the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target of 12.3, years ahead of the 2030 deadline. SDG12.3 aims to halve per capita global food waste and reduce food losses along production and supply chains by 2030, and thereby contribute to achieving zero hunger, among others.
As India pursues closer economic ties with Japan, it should also press for partnership on food waste reduction. Let us explain why.
Japan embraced supermarket and convenience-store chains decades ago, following a broader shift towards modern retail in industrialised economies. Pre-packaged food available around the clock serves urban workforce pressed for time, helping run smoothly a convenience-driven service economy. But the same convenience generates enormous quantities of surplus and wastage. Retailers routinely over-order to avoid empty shelves; products are pulled well before their actual expiry under Japan's informal "one-third rule", which requires delivery within the first third of a product's shelf life and withdrawal from shelves in the final third; and strict visual and aesthetic standards also push still-edible food out of circulation early.
Before this surplus turns into waste, it is routed to food banks—nonprofit intermediaries that collect surplus, donated or soon-to-expire food from retailers, manufacturers and individuals, and redistribute it to those facing food insecurity.
The impact has been striking. By 2023, Japan had cut total food loss by 53 per cent compared to 2000 levels—a 58 per cent reduction in business food loss and a 46 per cent reduction in household food loss. This makes it the only country to have met the SDG12.3 target of halving food loss, seven years ahead of the 2030 deadline.
These gains reflect decades of policy, community action and civil-society involvement. The legal framework includes laws that mandate food waste recycling and promote food loss and waste reduction through reporting of waste; reliable data helps policymakers identify where interventions are needed.
Culture has played a part, too. Japanese officials and practitioners often invoke mottainai, a sense that wasting something useful is regrettable. Public campaigns such as Temaedori, encourage shoppers to choose products at the front of shelves, rather than reaching for those with later expiry dates. Co-operation among food banks, supermarkets, food companies, local authorities, volunteers and small businesses has helped turn that ethos into practical action.
Our fieldwork in Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture, where we visited intermediaries such as Foodbank Yamanashi and Second Harvest Japan, revealed another important feature of the system: food banks can be integrated into local welfare provision. Under Japan’s 2013 Act on Supporting the Self-Reliance of Needy Persons, local authorities and welfare organisations can work with food banks to link food assistance to wider support. Foodbank Yamanashi’s “Lachic” programme, for example, combines food provision with vocational training for single mothers. In this model, reducing waste and alleviating poverty are not separate objectives but parts of a co-ordinated system involving government and civil society.
Although the bulk of the food retail in India lies with small neighbourhood grocery outlets, known as kirana store, the percentage of food waste in India is as high as in China due to its population size. Furthermore, modern retail and online grocery shopping are expanding in Indian cities. As the food system changes, India has an opportunity to build effective donation channels and food-bank networks into its development rather than trying to retrofit them later. Without such measures, growing retail surpluses could create a larger waste problem.
India does not have to start from scratch. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has supported food-recovery efforts, and independent food banks operate across the country. The India FoodBanking Network and Feeding India are members of the Global FoodBanking Network. What is missing is a framework that turns scattered charitable efforts into a durable system: better measurement and reporting of food waste by large businesses, formal links between food banks and local welfare services, and sustained public campaigns that make food-saving a social norm rather than an occasional appeal.
The argument is not meant to simply implement Japan’s model. It cannot be done. The two countries differ in income, demographics, retail infrastructure and the pace of urbanisation. Policies designed for an ageing, high-income society will not necessarily work in a younger, lower-middle-income country like India.
India should instead adapt the elements that fit its circumstances: reliable data, incentives for businesses to donate edible surplus, stronger local food-bank networks and closer co-operation between public agencies and civil society. The first step is to treat food waste not merely as an environmental problem, but also as a failure to connect available food with people who need it.
This is also an argument for broadening the meaning of trade between India and Japan. If Uttar Pradesh is prepared to build an industrial hub around its economic partnership with Japan, and Yamanashi has experience in reducing food waste and supporting food banks, there is scope to exchange knowledge as well as capital. In an age of climate change and persistent hunger, bilateral ties should be measured not only by factories, jobs and investment, but also by whether they help ensure that less food is wasted while fewer people go hungry. That, too, is a measure of a sustainable and humane economic partnership.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth