Washington, D.C.- Roughly a third of food is wasted, according to new statistics from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). That’s about 1.3 billion tons per year.
In the developing world, over 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest-while being stored or transported, and during processing and packing.
In industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of losses occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but often perfectly edible food.
“At a time when the land, water, and energy resources necessary to feed a global population of 6.9 billion are increasingly limited-and when at least one billion people remain chronically hungry-food losses mean a waste of those resources and a failure of our food system to meet the needs of the poor,” says the Worldwatch Institute.According to Tristram Stuart, a contributing author of Worldwatch's State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet report, some 150 million tons of grains are lost annually in low-income countries, six times the amount needed to meet the needs of all the hungry people in the developing world.
Meanwhile, industrialized countries waste some 222 million tons of perfectly good food annually, a quantity nearly equivalent to the 230 million tons that sub-Saharan Africa produces in a year.
Unlike farmers in many developing countries, however, agribusinesses in industrial countries have numerous tools at their disposal to prevent food from spoiling-including pasteurization and preservation facilities, drying equipment, climate-controlled storage units, transport infrastructure, and chemicals designed to expand shelf-life.
"All this may ironically have contributed to the cornucopian abundance that has fostered a culture in which staggering levels of 'deliberate' food waste are now accepted or even institutionalized," writes Stuart in his chapter, "Post-Harvest Losses: A Neglected Field."
"Throwing away cosmetically 'imperfect' produce on farms, discarding edible fish at sea, over-ordering stock for supermarkets, and purchasing or cooking too much food in the home, are all examples of profligate negligence toward food," he wrote.
"Humanity is approaching -- and in some places exceeding -- the limits of potential farmland and water supplies that can be used for farming," says Worldwatch Institute Executive Director Robert Engelman.
"We're already facing food price spikes and the early impacts of human-caused climate change on food production. We can't afford to overlook simple, low-cost fixes to reduce food waste," he says.
The Worldwatch Institute has several suggestions:
·Getting surpluses to those who need it. As mountains of food are thrown out every day in the cities of rich countries, some of the poorest citizens still struggle to figure out their next meal. The institute mentions several large food banks as one answer.
·Raising consumer awareness and reducing waste to landfills. Those who can easily afford to buy food - and throw it away - rarely consider how much they discard or find alternatives to sending unwanted food to the landfill. In 2010, however, San Francisco became the first city to pass legislation requiring all households to separate both recycling and compost from garbage. Nutrient-rich compost created by the municipal program is made available to farmers. The Love Food Hate Waste website in the United Kingdom has online recipes for using leftovers as well as tips and advice for reducing personal food waste.
·Improving storage and processing for small-scale farmers in developing countries. In the absence of expensive, Western-style grain stores and processing facilities, smallholders can undertake a variety of measures to prevent damage to their harvests. In Pakistan, the United Nations helped farmers cut their storage losses by up to 70 percent by simply replacing jute bags and mud-wall storages with metal grain storage bins. Purdue University is helping communities in rural Niger store cow peas in hermetically-sealed plastic bags. Another innovative project uses solar energy to dry mangoes after harvest; each year, more than 100,000 tons of the fruit go bad before reaching the market in western Africa.
