The World Food Waste Problem
Up to 40 percent of the food in the United States is never eaten.
But at the same time, one in eight Americans struggles to put enough food on the table.
- NRDC
This stat illustrates the substantial gap between waste and need.
Because of the growing disparity and inefficiencies throughout the supply chain, the issue has rightfully come to bear.
The impact of food waste affects many constituents in their day-to-day business operations and personal lives.
Profit margins are shrinking, and dollars are being wasted. For the food insecure, the impact is the greatest, purely by omission in the supply chain.
Although there are many new technologies to combat food waste, such as vacuum storage, dehydrators and shelf life extenders, they are generally cost prohibitive or customized to meet specific needs throughout the supply chain.
The government has also stepped in to help raise awareness and combat food inequalities with food waste challenges and the EPA’s call to action for stakeholders.
Although it’s a great start, more needs to be done to blunt the negative economic and environmental impact of food waste and put more food on the tables of those in need.
While the solutions might seem somewhat obvious, the physical and communication logisitcs are quite complex in their current state.
8 FACTS TO KNOW ABOUT FOOD WASTE AND HUNGER
From World Food Program USA
Approximately $1 trillion of food is lost or wasted every year.
Or roughly one-third of the world’s food. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), reversing this trend would preserve enough food to feed 2 billion people . That’s more than twice the number of undernourished people across the globe.
Roughly 30 to 40 percent of the food supply in the U.S. is wasted.
Which works out to more than 20 pounds of food per person per month.
If wasted food were a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China.
Consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa each year.
The amount of post-harvest food loss in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 cost $4 billion
Surpassing what the region received in food assistance that year.
Cutting global food waste in half by 2030 is one of the U.N.’s top priorities.
In fact, it’s one of organization’s 17 sustainable development goals.
The World Food Programme’s (WFP) Zero Post Harvest Losses project
Sells low-cost, locally produced grain silos to farmers and provides them with training on post-harvest crop management in five key areas: Harvesting, drying, threshing, solarization and storage.
WFP is also tackling food waste by boosting access to local markets.
This includes sourcing its school meals with locally grown crops, working with communities to build better roads and storage facilities and, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, providing cargo bikes to mostly female farmers to increase their access to markets.
What is the Solution?
