Amber Economy is an emerging economic framework designed to transform how food systems are understood, valued and governed.

Traditionally, food has been treated primarily as a commodity within economic systems. The Amber Economy proposes a different perspective: food must be recognized as a strategic asset that generates multidimensional value — economic, nutritional, social, territorial and environmental.

From this perspective, the performance of food systems should not be evaluated only by production volumes, trade flows or financial profitability. Instead, they should be assessed by their capacity to preserve, redistribute, recover and maximize the full value embedded in food across the system.

The Amber Economy reframes food loss, waste and underutilization not simply as operational inefficiencies, but as forms of systemic value destruction. When food is lost, societies also lose nutrition, labor, water, energy, territorial resilience and social opportunity.

As a conceptual framework, the Amber Economy integrates insights from sustainable food systems, food security and nutrition, circular economy applied to food, bioeconomy, food system resilience and true cost accounting. Its contribution is to reorganize these perspectives under a unified logic centered on the integral value of food.

Within this architecture, the Amber Economy operates as the applied economic logic of the Food Impact Economy, which represents the broader vision for redesigning global food systems around measurable impact.

The concept of the Amber Economy was developed within the Food Impact Economy initiative by Mónica Colín de Velázquez and Karen Brugés.

By placing the full value of food at the center of economic decision-making, the Amber Economy supports the transition toward food systems that generate not only food, but resilience, wellbeing and shared prosperity.

Amber Economy

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Amber Economy

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