By James Murray, Source: Business Green

food
The global crisis in food waste is even graver than previously thought, according to a major new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that blames avoidable food waste for 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and annual economic losses totalling $750bn.

The new Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources report is described as the first major study to investigate the full range of environmental impacts that result from inefficient food production, distribution, and consumption processes.

It calculates that 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted each year, directly contributing to food shortages, water stress, unnecessary biodiversity loss, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, to highlighting the impact of methane emissions from rotting food, the report calculates that globally a level of water three times greater than the annual flow of Russia’s Volga river is required each year to produce food that is ultimately wasted.

Meanwhile, 1.4 billion hectares of land, equivalent to 28 per cent of the world’s agricultural area, is said to be used to produce food that is then lost or wasted. As a result, economic losses associated with food loss, excluding seafood, are estimated to reach $750bn a year.

“We all – 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. “In addition to 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.”

The report is the latest step in the UN’s Think Eat Save – Reduce Your Foodprint campaign, and features best practice guidance and a series of case studies detailing how some companies and governments have successfully curbed food waste levels.

It argues that action is needed both at the “upstream” level of production, harvesting and storage, which accounts for 54 per cent of food waste, and at the “downstream” processing, distribution, and consumption level, which accounts for the remaining waste. It also recommends that action should be targeted at the “hot spot” areas with the highest levels of food waste, such as meat production in high income countries, fruit production in Asia, Latin America and Europe, and cereal production in Asia.

The report states that significant reductions in food waste can be achieved through improved education of farmers and the roll out of more efficient technologies, with the food waste differential between the best and worst performing farms revealing that there is substantial room for improvement.

“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,” the report states.

It also calls for better education of consumers on the need to tackle food waste and improved packaging from retailers, especially in industrialised countries, to help tackle over-buying of food that is ultimately wasted. It cites the example of some retailers relaxing purchasing standards to offer more “ugly” fruit and veg as an encouraging means of tackling food waste and calls on governments to relax “over zealous” regulations that impose unnecessarily short sell-by dates on some products.

Finally, the report calls for a more co-ordinated and ambitious approach to rolling out business models and technologies that reduce the environmental impact of unavoidable food waste, such as re-use programmes that ensure unwanted food is used as animal feed or anaerobic digestion plants that can turn waste food into biogas, slashing greenhouse gas emissions and providing a source of clean energy.