One-Third Of Global Food Supply Wasted Annually: UN
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Some 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year, said a United Nations report published on Wednesday, bringing about major economic losses to food producers and causing significant environmental damage due to needlessly produced greenhouse gases.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), about 28 percent of the world’s farmland was producing food that would not be eaten. This contributed to an additional 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere, while the food waste also cost producers some $750 billion annually.
Some 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year, said a United Nations report published on Wednesday, bringing about major economic losses to food producers and causing significant environmental damage due to needlessly produced greenhouse gases.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), about 28 percent of the world’s farmland was producing food that would not be eaten. This contributed to an additional 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere, while the food waste also cost producers some $750 billion annually.
“Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River,” said the FAO’s Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources report, calling on consumers and producers alike to cut down on “inappropriate practices.”
“All of us – farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers – must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva in a statement.
[quote]“We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”[/quote]The report identified Asia as one of the main areas where food is wasted, noting that more than 100kg of vegetables per capita were wasted annually on average in “Industrialized Asia,” which includes China, Japan and South Korea. Asia, the world’s most populous continent, is also estimated to waste 80kg of cereals – primarily rice – per person every year.
Meanwhile, high-income regions were responsible for about 67 percent of all meat waste. Although meat accounted for just 4 percent of total food wastage, it contributed to about 20 percent of the economic cost of this wastage, while taking up between 46-85 percent of land.
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54 percent of the world’s food wastage occurs “upstream” during production, post-harvest handling and storage. The rest took place during the processing, distribution and consumption stages.
Speaking at a joint-press conference, the head of the UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) Achim Steiner called the waste “a staggering phenomenon.”
“This is a big wakeup call,” he said. “We may not even have captured many of the more indirect impacts of food waste … and the costs which will be born by our children and grandchildren.”
[quote]”It will take less than 37 years to add another two billion people to the global population. How on earth will we feed ourselves in the future?” he warned.[/quote]Related: Food Waste Fiasco: Breaking The Gordian Knot Of The World’s Food Supply
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“Today’s excellent report by FAO underlines the multiple benefits that can be realized – in many cases through simple and thoughtful measures by for example households, retailers, restaurants, schools and businesses – that can contribute to environmental sustainability, economic improvements, food security and the realization of the UN Secretary General’s Zero Hunger Challenge,” Steiner added, urging countries to join the agencies’ joint campaign to stem food waste ‘Think Eat Save – Reduce Your Foodprint!’
Download The Full Report Here
