Lina Maria Gómez Cortés, Dalhousie University

Measuring What We Cannot See: Data Governance and Food Loss and Waste in the Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional Food Chains of Canada and Colombia: According to the ECCC (2019), most of Canada's food loss and waste (FLW) occurs before food reaches households, primarily inside the industrial, commercial, and institutional (IC&I) sectors, including manufacturing, wholesale, retail, hospitality, and public institutions. Uneaten food has climate implications at every stage, from the emissions produced during its creation to those released after its disposal (Crippa et al., 2021). Yet, measurement is weakest across this value chain. Canada lacks a unified national baseline, and IC&I data is fragmented across federal, provincial, and private-sector sources, often restricted by proprietary protections or confidentiality (Gooch et al., 2019). The IC&I sectors are also largely excluded from municipal organics collection, resulting in private disposal contracts with limited oversight (Alexander et al., 2023). Without measurement, progress against SDG target 12.3 cannot be tracked.

Rather than assuming that FLW data is comparable across contexts, this study identifies where FLW data exists and characterizes its quality across three levels of governance: macro, meso, and micro, corresponding to national/federal, provincial, and municipal levels of data availability and government in both countries (Wang & Strong, 1996; Wilkinson et al., 2016). The output findings of this research are to evaluate data quality and availability. Applied to Canada, where data is fragmented across federal, provincial, and private-sector sources, and to Colombia, which has a centralized national baseline (DNP, 2016) but weak mid-chain monitoring, this comparison reveals the conditions of governance under which credible FLW measurement is possible.

A central finding is that measurement is weakest where legal obligations to measure would be most feasible to enforce. This raises three questions that this research is positioned to address: First, who should be responsible for measuring FLW? How should data quality enter legal and policy instruments? And when, if ever, is public intervention justified to close a private data gap?

Melika Habibi, Schulich School of Law