Direct Economic Costs of $750 billion Annually
\nBetter Policies Required, and \u201cSuccess Stories\u201d Need to be Scaled Up and Replicated
\nRome, 11 September 2013 \u2013 The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report released today.
\nFood Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources is the first study to analyze the impacts of global food wastage from an environmental perspective, looking specifically at its consequences for the climate, water and land use, and biodiversity.
\nAmong its key findings:
\nEach year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water three times larger than the annual flow of Russia\u2019s Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet\u2019s atmosphere.
\nIn addition to its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO\u2019s report estimates.
\n\u201cWe all \u2013 farmers and fishers; food processers and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers \u2014 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\u2019t,\u201d said FAO Director-General Jos\u00e9 Graziano da Silva.
\n\u201cIn addition the environmental imperative, there is a moral one: We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste, when 870 million people go hungry every day, \u201d he added.
\nAs a companion to its new study, FAO has also published \u201ctool-kit\u201d that contains recommendations on how food loss and waste can be reduced at every stage of the food chain.
\nThe tool-kit profiles a number of projects around the world that show how national and local governments, farmers, businesses, and individual consumers can take steps to tackle the problem.
\nAchim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said:\u00a0\u00bbUNEP and FAO have identified food waste and loss\u2014food wastage\u2014as a major opportunity for economies everywhere to assist in a transition towards a low carbon, resource efficient and inclusive Green Economy. Today\u2019s excellent report by the FAO underlines the multiple benefits that can be realized\u2014 in many cases through simple and thoughtful measures by for example households, retailers, restaurants, schools and businesses\u2014that can contribute to environmental sustainability, economic improvements, food security and the realization of the UN Secretary General\u2019s Zero Hunger Challenge. We would urge everyone to adopt the motto of our joint campaign: Think Eat Save\u2014Reduce Your Foodprint!\u00a0\u00bb.
\nUNEP and FAO are founding partners of the Think Eat Save\u2014Reduce Your Foodprint campaign that was launched earlier in the year and whose aim is to assist in coordinating world-wide efforts to manage down wastage.
\nWhere wastage happens
\nFifty-four percent of the world\u2019s food wastage occurs \u201cupstream\u201d during production, post-harvest handling and storage, according to FAO\u2019s study. Forty-six percent of it happens \u201cdownstream,\u201d at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.
\nAs a general trend, developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher in middle- and high-income regions \u2014 where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage \u2014 than in low-income regions (4-16 percent).
\nThe later a food product is lost along the chain, the greater the environmental consequences, FAO\u2019s report notes, since the environmental costs incurred during processing, transport, storage and cooking must be added to the initial production costs.
\nHot spots
\nSeveral world food wastage \u201chot-spots\u201d stand out in the study:
\nWastage of cereals in Asia is a significant problem, with major impacts on carbon emissions and water and land use. Rice\u2019s profile is particularly noticeable, given its high methane emissions combined with a large level of wastage.
\nWhile meat wastage volumes in all world regions is comparatively low, the meat sector generates a substantial impact on the environment in terms of land occupation and carbon footprint, especially in high-income countries and Latin America, which in combination account for 80 percent of all meat wastage. Excluding Latin America, high-income regions are responsible for about 67 percent of all meat wastage
\nFruit wastage contributes significantly to water waste in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, mainly as a result of extremely high wastage levels.
\nSimilarly, large volumes of vegetable wastage in industrialized Asia, Europe, and South and South East Asia translates into a large carbon footprint for that sector.
\nCauses of food wastage \u2013 and options for addressing them
\nA combination of consumer behavior and lack of communication in the supply chain underlies the higher levels of food waste in affluent societies, according to FAO. Consumers fail to plan their shopping, overpurchase, or over-react to \u201cbest-before-dates,\u201d while quality and aesthetic standards lead retailers to reject large amounts of perfectly edible food.
\nIn developing countries, significant post-harvest losses in the early part of the supply chain are a key problem, occurring as a result of financial and structural limitations in harvesting techniques and storage and transport infrastructure, combined with climatic conditions favorable to food spoilage.
\nTo tackle the problem, FAO\u2019s toolkit details three general levels where action is needed:
\n\u00b7 High priority should be given to reducing food wastage in the first place. Beyond improving losses of crops on farms due to poor practices, doing more to better balance production with demand would mean not using natural resources to produce unneeded food in the first place.
\n\u00b7 In the event of a food surplus, re-use within the human food chain\u2014 finding secondary markets or donating extra food to feed vulnerable members of society\u2014 represents the best option. If the food is not fit for human consumption, the next best option is to divert it for livestock feed, conserving resources that would otherwise be used to produce commercial feedstuff.
\n\u00b7 Where re-use is not possible, recycling and recovery should be pursued: by-product recycling, anaerobic digestion, compositing, and incineration with energy recovery allow energy and nutrients to be recovered from food waste, representing a significant advantage over dumping it in landfills. (Uneaten food that ends up rotting in landfills is a large producer of methane, a particularly harmful GHG.
\nFunding for the Food Wastage Footprint report and toolkit was provided by the government of Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Direct Economic Costs of $750 billion Annually Better Policies Required, and \u201cSuccess Stories\u201d Need to be Scaled Up and Replicated Rome, 11 September 2013 \u2013 The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity
+ Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[539,2079],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-health-well-being"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/12h71.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}