FAO
Direct
Economic Costs of $750 billion Annually Better Policies Required, and
"Success Stories" Need to be Scaled Up and Replicated
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.
Food 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.
Among its key findings:
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 and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of
greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere.
In 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's
report estimates.
"We all - farmers and fishers;
food processers 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 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,
" he added.
As a companion to its new study, FAO
has also published "tool-kit" that contains recommendations on how
food loss and waste can be reduced at every stage of the food chain.
The 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.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary
General and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said:"UNEP
and FAO have identified food waste and loss-food wastage-as a major opportunity
for economies everywhere to assist in a transition towards a low carbon,
resource efficient and inclusive Green Economy. Today's excellent report by the
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.We would urge everyone to adopt
the motto of our joint campaign: Think Eat Save-Reduce Your Foodprint!".
UNEP and FAO are founding partners
of the Think Eat Save-Reduce 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.
Where wastage happens
Fifty-four percent of the world's
food wastage occurs "upstream" during production, post-harvest
handling and storage, according to FAO's study. Forty-six percent of it happens
"downstream," at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.
As 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 - where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage -
than in low-income regions (4-16 percent).
The later a food product is lost
along the chain, the greater the environmental consequences, FAO's report
notes, since the environmental costs incurred during processing, transport,
storage and cooking must be added to the initial production costs.
Hot spots
Several world food wastage
"hot-spots" stand out in the study:
Wastage of cereals in Asia is a significant problem, with major impacts
on carbon emissions and water and land use. Rice's profile is particularly
noticeable, given its high methane emissions combined with a large level of
wastage.
While 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
Fruit wastage contributes
significantly to water waste in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, mainly as a result of extremely high wastage levels.
Similarly, large volumes of
vegetable wastage in industrialized Asia, Europe, and South and South East Asia
translates into a large carbon footprint for that sector.
Causes of food wastage - and options
for addressing them
A 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 "best-before-dates,"
while quality and aesthetic standards lead retailers to reject large amounts of
perfectly edible food.
In 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.
To tackle the problem, FAO's toolkit
details three general levels where action is needed:
- 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.
- In the event of a food surplus, re-use within the human food chain- finding secondary markets or donating extra food to feed vulnerable members of society- 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.
- 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.
Funding for the Food Wastage Footprint
report and toolkit was provided by the government of Germany.
NOTES
TO EDITORS
What is food wastage?
Food loss is the unintended reduction in food available for human
consumption that results from inefficiencies in supply chains: poor
infrastructure and logistics, lack of technology, insufficient skills,
knowledge and management capacity. It mainly occurs at production- postharvest
and processing stages, for example when food goes unharvested or is damaged
during processing, storage and transport and disposed of.
Food waste refers to intentional discards of edible items, mainly by
retailers and consumers, and is due to the behavior of businesses and
individuals.
The term food wastage refers
to the two in combination.
Food wastage: Key facts and figures
- The global volume of food wastage s estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of "primary product equivalents." Total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes.
- Food wastage's carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
- The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent than three times the annual flow of Russia's Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
- Similarly, 1.4 billion hectares of land - 28% percent of the world's agricultural area - is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.
- Agriculture is responsible for a majority of threats to at-risk plant and animal species tracked by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
- Only a low percentage of all food wastage is composted: much of it ends up in landfills, and represents a large part of municipal solid waste. Methane emissions from landfills represents one of the largest sources of GHG emissions from the waste sector.
- Home composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection authorities.
- Developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while in higher in middle- and high-income regions, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher.
- The direct economic consequences of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually.
What governments, farmers, food
businesses - and you - can do about food waste
Reduce and prevent
One major front for action in the
effort to reduce food wastage is developing better food harvest, storage,
processing, transport and retailing processes, according to FAO's guide, Toolkit:
Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint, released alongside its new report on
the environmental consequences of food waste.
Harvest losses have several causes,
including bad timing of and poor conditions during the harvest as well is
inadequate techniques and equipment. Similarly, lack of good infrastructure for
transportation, storage, cooling and marketing cause food to spoil, especially
in hot climates.
Both the private and public sectors
need to increase investments to address such shortcomings; doing so will also
have additional benefits for food security and mitigating climate change, land
degradation and biodiversity erosion..
In addition to these core
investments, new technologies can help too. Improved rice-storage bags
in the Philippines have helped cut losses of that staple grain by 15 percent.
In West Africa, use of solar dryers to extend the shelf life of fruit and
tubers is showing promise in reducing post-harvest losses.
Often, food losses can be
significantly reduced simply through training farmers in best practices-this
too merits investing in, according to FAO's toolkit.
Joining farmers together in
cooperatives or professional associations can greatly help reduce food losses by increasing their understanding of the market, enabling
more efficient planning, enabling economies of scale and improving their
ability to market what they produce.
On the retail and consumer side, raising
awareness of the problem - and how to prevent it-is just as important,
according to FAO.
And businesses and households
alike need to implement better monitoring to improve data on the scale of
wastage and where it occurs.
Business - both those operating
within the food chain as well as others with a large "food footprint"
(large cafeterias, for instance) - can conduct food waste audits to determine
how and why they waste food and identify opportunities to improve their
performance.
Households can conduct relatively
simple food waste audits as well.
Better communication among all
participants in food supply chains
will be crucial. In particular, there is vast room for improvement
improving communication between suppliers and retailers to match demand and
supply. Discrepancies between demand and supply are a major cause of food
wastage. They can involve farmers not finding a market for products and leaving
them to rot in the field; mothers cooking for five family members while only
three actually make it to dinner; supermarkets downsizing product orders at the
last minute, leaving producers with unsalable products; or restaurants
overestimating demand and overstocking food supplies that go bad.
Reduced, or better, food packaging has a role to play as well -excessive or unsustainably
sourced packing forms part of the environmental cost of food.
Especially in developed countries, more
environmentally-minded food retailing is needed, says FAO - for example,
moving away from the practice of displaying very large quantities of food
(perceived as contributing to increased sales) or discarding food when it
starts to approach the end of its shelf life.
Rejection of food products on the
basis of aesthetic or safety concerns is often another a major cause of food
losses and waste. In some cases, farmers discard between 20-40 percent of their
fresh produce because it doesn't meet retailer's cosmetic specifications.
Regulations and standards on
aesthetic requirements for fruit and vegetables could stand to be revised. Some supermarkets have already begun relaxing their
standards on fruit appearance, selling "mis-shaped" items for a
reduced price and helping raise consumers' awareness that odd-shaped does
not mean bad.
Better consumption habits are also
badly needed. In developed countries, a
significant part of total food wastage occurs at the consumer level; in some
places this is a trend that continues to rise.
In addition to conducting household
food waste audits, consumers can take many steps to reverse these
trends, such as: making weekly menu plans, buying so-called "ugly fruits
and vegetables," ensuring that refrigerators are working properly, using
wilting produce in soups, and making better use of leftovers. Smaller servings,
rotating older food items towards the front of shelves and refrigerators,
freezing surplus items, and composting waste can also help.
One factor that often contributes to
food waste by consumers is confusion over sell-by and best-before dates, notes
the FAO toolkit. In some cases "over-zealous" legislation has been
adopted and should be revisited and revised; lawmakers and other
authorities should also issue clearer and more flexible guidelines for
businesses and consumers alike.
Governments must do more to
implement legislation aimed at lowering food wastage, says FAO. According to the toolkit, "Legislators will
have to adopt a range of measures which may vary from broad policy frameworks
to statements of intent, from soft law measures like recommendations and
guidelines to more decisive legislation, such as directives, regulations and
statutory acts."
Re-use
Markets for products that wouldn't
normally stay in the food chain must be developed, argues Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint
Gleaning, for example, is the practice of gathering groups that would, for one
reason or the other, be left in the fields to rot and be plowed under. In some
places, entrepreneurs have spotted opportunities in acquiring such produce at
reduced rates and marketing it, developing new food value chains.
Similarly, markets can be developed
for products rejected by retailers but still good for consumption - farmers'
markets are already playing a role here.
Redistributing safe surplus food to
those in need represents "the best option" for dealing with food
waste, argues FAO's study.
At present, the amount of food
redistributed to charities that feed people remains a tiny fraction of the
edible surplus food available, due to the fact that such food redistribution
faces a number of barriers.
"Retailers are largely
influenced by the idea that it is cheaper and easier to send wastage to the
landfill, although higher landfill taxes are now working as a deterrent,"
explains FAO's toolkit. But, it adds, the factor that has most deterred
businesses from donating food surpluses is the risk of being held legally
liable in case of intoxication, illness or other injury. Increasingly, governments
are looking at ways to smooth the process and afford protections to food donors
should products given away in good faith cause illness.
Recycle
In order for cities and local
governments to efficiently and effectively recycle food waste, actions taken at
the household level to separate it out are essential - recycling
schemes only work when waste is properly sorted at the source. Judiciously
used, regulations can spur businesses and households to reduce food waste and
better manage it when it comes time for recycling.
Rather than merely disposing of such
waste in landfills, the use of anaerobic digestion to break it down into
digestate - which can be used as fertilizer - and biogas, which can be used as
an energy source or injected into the gas grid - is environmentally
preferable to both composting and landfill disposal.
Where digestion is not possible,
composting represents the best fall-back option. At the individual level, home composting can potentially
divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection
authorities.
Finally, incineration of food
waste with the energy released being recovered presents the option of last
resort for preventing food waste from ending up in landfills. Methane
emissions from landfills represent the largest source of GHG emissions from the
entire waste sector, contributing around 700 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent
per year.
- See more at:
http://www.unep.org/newscentre/default.aspx?DocumentID=2726&ArticleID=9611#sthash.7kJZjGMX.dpuf
- Sayed Mohammad Naim KHALID
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