No Crop Left Behind| Food for Thought

Food for Thought

Your challenge is to consider the journey of food to your plate, determine how disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting the food supply locally and globally, and propose solutions to address these issues.

Annona

Summary

Annona is a humanitarian relief platform solving food supply disruptions and poverty-induced hunger by connecting farmers that have food waste with organizations who can distribute surpluses to those in need.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our Solution

Our solution to end the world hunger one crop at a time is to connect surplus of food to those who are in need. 

How We Developed This Project

Motivation

Annona, derived from Cura Annonae  (an ancient Roman term for  'care of the grain supply'), was inspired by the growing challenges faced by farmers and impoverished communities in wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Annona recognizes socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the food industry. We are using data sets from the  United States Environmental Protection Agency about food loss and waste to understand the severity of these issues prior pandemic so that we can project how much the food accessibility and distribution will be impacted after the pandemic.

Approach

Python was used to represent data from http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/flw-data/en/

Why are we focusing on food waste and loss? Our motivation https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/food-material-specific-data

Research and Data

Food loss and waste data was obtained from Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to see the results of food loss and waste around the world. Obtained data was later narrowed to United States only for simplification purposes (check foodloss.csv US tab) where only highlighted columns were the main point of attention.

Data obtained from the given sources impacted our project because we were able to identify what food sources were the most subjected to waste. Most of which are popular among consumers such as dairy, nuts, etc. Also, data from this project showed us past historical trends and how that will incorporate into 2020 and post COVID-19. In the future, we are planning to use the data obtain to predict how much food waste will be affected by the pandemic.

Tools

Our web platform was built with JavaScript, Node, PostgreSQL, React, and AWS. Data analysis was conducted using Python using plotly package to represent data from FAO  (Food Loss and Waste Database). Our tool for graphic design was Adobe Illustrator. For our slides presentation, we used Google Slides.

Project Demo
Tags
#agriculture #foodwaste #foodsupply #foodchain #land cover #urban #covid #economicimpact #worldhunger #foodbank #charity #nonprofit #savetheearth #sustainability #foodrelief
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.