Food Wastage: Some Unpalatable Truths

food wastage

Every year, the world wastes a third of the food it consumes. That’s about 1.4 billion tonnes of food, which can easily feed some two billion people a year. Here’s a fact sheet on global food wastage.  

Just this week, news agency Reuters reported that Japanese companies are using advanced technologies including artificial intelligence to reduce waste and cut costs during Covid-19 and tackling food waste is one of the biggest priorities of Japan, which has the highest food waste per capita among Asian countries. Japan, which has over 125 million people, wastes six million tonnes of food every year.  

Japan has big plans in place to tackle food waste. The government says by 2030 it will bring down its food wastage to half of what it had wasted in 2000. The government has put in place a myriad of plans. These include measures it wants Japanese companies to use to calculate and contain wastage of food. Reuters reports companies such as Lawson, a convenience store giant owned by Mitsubishi, are now using AI to track unsold and under-demand food products on its shelves. Lawson uses technologies from DataRobot, which is a US-based enterprise AI firm. The store behemoth thinks such efforts can help it reduce food waste significantly. 

Japan is one of the many countries in the world which has taken the issue of food waste seriously. For decades, waste management experts and institutions such as the UN body of FAO have been raising red flags at the way the world has been wasting precious food. Recent reports suggest that the problem has peaked of late. Today, the world wastes an estimated 1.4 billion tonnes of consumable food, according to UN agencies. To put this in perspective, this is food that can feed nearly 2-3 billion people a year. Granted, not every bit of wasted food cannot be saved, but the UN estimates even if we could save a fourth of the food we lost today, it could easily feed some 900 million to one billion hungry stomachs.

Food for thought

A study shows in Australia one in five bags of food consumers buy ends up wasted. Food experts have already estimated the value of the food we waste today — $1 trillion a year. The collateral damage of food waste is eerie if you come to know about its impact. For instance, if we could reuse the water that was used in the production of the food we wasted it could provide some nine billion people with about 200 litres a day. If you take continents, Europe alone wastes food that can feed some 200 million people. In Latin America and Africa, the number stands at 300 million each. 

There’s more. Climate scientists say that food loss and waste are major reasons that power greenhouse gas emissions today. Every year nearly 4.4 gigatons of GHGs are released as a result of food waste. This means, if we could take food waste as a nation, it would be the third-largest GHG emitter after China and the US, as observed by Earth.org.

Tackling food waste is important because the demand for consumable food has been rising alarmingly over the past few decades. With the global population hitting 9 billion in about a decade or so, food industry watchers and demographics experts warn that we must increase food production by 70 per cent at least to meet the demand. Even though technology has made food production easier than ever, various factors including climate change, lack of arable land, distribution and logistics problems are going to create unpalatable issues in food production as food wastage means cuts in farm income and spikes in the prices for consumers. So, it is important to figure out sustainable ways to understand and check food waste, and not resort to tokenism and stop-gap arrangements, warn food experts. 

What needs to be done?

Actions can come at multiple levels. At the individual level, it is important to understand the importance of food wastage and introduce checks and balances in consumption, say experts. A recent report from the UN shows that in 2019 homes, retail outlets and restaurants wasted 17 per cent of the food available to them. Both the rich and the poor countries fare equally on this front. At the company level, cutting-edge technologies can be used to improve the packing of food so the goods can last longer, make storage and logistics more efficient so wastage is cut short and more people can do with less. Food recycling and reuse is another important step. Food production and distribution companies can use tech-enabled tools, like the Japanese companies, to predict demand and analyse consumption patterns so they can avoid wastage and encourage reuse. 

At the policy level more needs to be done, feel food watchers. Food waste reduction and management should become a policy priority. The FAO has been urging nations to prioritise this issue and take urgent, proactive steps to reduce food waste. The UN’s  Food Loss Index (FLI) and the Food Waste Index (FWI) are the steps in the right direction. While the FLI tracks food being lost during production or in the food supply chain before it reaches retailers, FWI looks at the food we, consumers and retailers, throw away.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 12.3 states that by 2030, we must “halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses.” Both the FLI and FWI are synced to the SDG and governments are urged to introduce national policies for tackling food wastage. Among the countries that have introduced noteworthy measures against food wastage, Australia stands out for its plans. In 2019, the country’s National Food Waste Baseline Report, found that Australian made more than 7 million tonnes of food waste in 2016-17, costing the economy $20 billion. 

Chew on this 

The FAO says it has a two-pronged approach to the problem. It wants countries and companies to improve data collection along the supply chain through sampling and surveying and statistical tools that are blended into national agricultural statistics systems. The next step is to estimate model-based losses where data is not available for now. The FAO  has developed a  model for this task. Countries such as India have reportedly incorporated such approaches into their policy apparatus but with less amount of succes. 

In India, which houses nearly 1.4 billion people and ranks 103 on the Global Hunger Index (GHI), addressing the problem of food wastage becomes paramount. For instance, 2018 estimates suggest that every year India wastes food that equals the total food that the UK eats. Indian weddings by rule waste about 20 per cent of the food they serve. India wastes food that’s worth $14 billion a year. Even though the government has introduced schemes such asPM Kisan Sampada Yojana to better handle farm produce, the country wastes a large amount of the food it produces. Taking a more serious approach to food wastage is important.

Also Read: The Great Indian Water Crisis: More Bad News

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