What is Giving Compass?
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Giving Compass' Take:
• The Refresh Working Group highlights 5 policy focus areas for regulation the responsible use of technology in every area of the food supply chain.
• What role does regulation play in innovation in the food sector? How can you support policy that encourages revolution and improvement while ensuring the safety of consumers and producers?
• Read about meatless meat and sustainability.
The Refresh Working Group (RWG) brings together food, agriculture, and technology experts from across the United States to ensure the positive application and responsible use of emerging technologies and data across these sectors. We represent 21 states, 38 individuals, and multisector stakeholders from across the agriculture, food, and technology industries, including distribution, retail, and consumer goods.
Our goal is to ensure robust and healthy agriculture, and food marketplaces where innovation thrives and where small and big players alike can drive positive improvements throughout the global food system. We are motivated by the concepts of resiliency and food sovereignty, the notion that a community not only has the right to healthy and sustainable food but also that they should control the systems through which that food is grown, processed, and consumed. We also note the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our global food system and the new challenges posed by the pandemic for food security, on-farm food loss, and worker safety. And we see the opportunities for transforming the food systems of the future to create better equality, equity, and social justice.
We recognize the limits and opportunities for data-driven technologies to increase food security and efficiency while reducing the environmental impact of the national food supply chain. We rely on technological innovation to support our work in addressing concerns and promoting positive outcomes. We have worked together to describe the intersection of technology with our work, and the policy positions that we believe will enable us to take full advantage of advancements within the digital sphere. Our ability to leverage technology to accomplish this purpose depends, in part, on policies that support the outcomes outlined in the five policy focus areas that we have identified:
- Physical and Digital Food Security
- Data Protection
- Supply Chain Transparency
- Broadband Expansion
- Digitally-Skilled Workforce
Recognizing that no good policy is one-size-fits-all, we present these five policy focus areas along with our recommendations for next steps, as we have evaluated them with the context of federal, state, and local needs. By establishing common rules of the road for the use of data and technology in the food system, stakeholders can be confident that they are acting responsibly while taking advantage of the opportunities offered by technological advancements in agriculture and food.
Today, more than 40 million people across the United States are food and nutrition insecure and rely on food assistance programs in order to feed their families.In addition to increasing the risk for diet-related noncommunicable diseases such as obesity, low consumption of nutritious foods can also suppress a person’s immune response and resilience against viruses like COVID-19. There are four primary dimensions of physical food security that have been defined over time by food systems and hunger experts: 1) physical availability of food; 2) economic and physical access to food; 3) food utilization; and 4) stability of the other three dimensions over time. The concept of nutrition security further holds that it is imperative to consider the healthfulness and nutritive qualities of available and accessible foods, beyond exclusively a diet’s ability to satisfy a person’s base caloric needs. Emerging technologies are proving to be important tools to help achieve food and nutrition security because data-driven analyses of hunger, food loss and waste, and food availability can offer new insights and therefore, potential solutions, into these intractable issues.