By Karen Abrams
While food prices increase, and food shortages plague developing countries, producing countries lose a large supply of food annually to waste due to transportation, cold storage and distribution problems, while in developed nations like the UK, US, and Japan, consumers and organizations waste billions of dollars in food each year due to over buying, poor planning, busy schedules and a myriad of reasons explored below.
According to P K Mishra, secretary in the ministry’s department of agriculture and co-operation in India, 72% of India’s fruit and vegetable production goes to waste because of lack of proper retailing and adequate storage capacity. In the US, a study, from the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, indicates that a shocking forty to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest in the US never gets eaten.
Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, has spent the last 10 years measuring food loss, including the last eight under a grant from the US department of agriculture (USDA). Jones started examining practices in farms and orchards, before going onto food production, retail, consumption and waste disposal. What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security.
The story gets worse, official surveys indicate that every year more than 350 billion pounds (160 billion kg) of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States. Of that total, nearly 30% — including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. Food production daily reports, “On average, households waste 14 per cent of their food purchases. Fifteen per cent of that includes products still within their expiration date but never opened.
According to a recent NY Times article, “Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten.
The story is no better in the UK, where, according to Tree Hugger Magazine, “Britons waste about $20billion USD in food each year. About £6bn of the wasted annual food budget is food that is bought but never touched – including 13m unopened yoghurt pots, 5,500 chickens and 440,000 ready to eat meals dumped in home rubbish bins each day. The rest is food prepared or cooked for meals but never eaten because people have misjudged how much was needed and don’t eat the leftovers”. The figures have been compiled by Wrap, the waste and resources action programme, which previously made the £8bn estimate and has warned we are throwing away a third of the food we buy, enough to fill Wembley stadium with food waste eight times over in a year.
But the horror of this story is not only that while tons of food is wasted, many in developing countries go hungry. Cutting food waste would also go a long way toward reducing serious environmental problems. Jones estimates that reducing food waste by half could reduce adverse environmental impacts by 25 per cent through reduced landfill use, soil depletion and applications of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Some say that, ”food biodegrades so where is the problem?”, according to a recent CNN report, the problem, environmentalists say, is just that. When food rots, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says is 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide (CO2). The University of Arizona believes that if Americans cut their food waste in half, it would reduce the country’s environmental impact by 25 percent. The UK’s Waste & Resources Action Program (WRAP) — which says the entire food supply chain in the UK contributes 20 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions — believes that if we stopped throwing out edible food, the impact it would have on CO2 emissions would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off the road.
According to Britian’s food industry veteran and farmer Lord Christopher Haskins of Skidby in a January 2008 speech delivered on the subject, “Are the Malthusian chickens coming home to roost?”, referring of course to the 18th century cleric Reverend Malthus, who predicted that that there would be a crisis in food supply as a result of swift population growth. His prediction of a world food crisis was not far off however, as recently emphasized by the UN at its summit on the global food crisis today. There, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared world food production must rise by 50% by 2030. The crisis looms as food prices have risen 83% in the last three years, according to the World Bank. It is also estimated that soaring food prices could push as many as 100 million more people into hunger.
The world wide consensus today is that food-waste reduction must become a priority for both developing and developed nations. The UN world food program states, “total surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy “every empty stomach” in Africa , France’s leftovers could feed the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Italy’s could feed Ethiopia’s undernourished. Countries like Guyana would benefit from more efficient transportation, distribution and cold storage systems. Now that the “grow more food” campaign is gaining in popularity; priority and attention must be paid to support issues like food processing, transportation and cold storage or else simply put; the “grow more campaign” will create a horrible byproduct of “waste more food”, a situation Guyana and other developing countries can ill afford in a time of crisis.
Experts in developed countries are optimistic and predict that food-waste will be reduced over time, especially in light of rising food prices. Consumers in the US are already making numerous lifestyle changes to combat rising gas prices and many are now resorting to clipping coupons, cooking more meals at home and reducing food expenditure in attempts to stretch discretionary dollars. On a global scale, the obvious solution is to curb food waste and sync supply with demand. Achieving this goal however is easier said than done; a global challenge but a challenge that may run counter to national imperatives as nations scurry to primarily secure their own food security. The saga continues.
