Households waste one billion meals a day

‘Just staggering’

Households around the world threw away one billion meals every single day in 2022 in what the UN yesterday called a “global tragedy” of food waste.

More than $1 trillion worth of food was binned by households and businesses at a time when nearly 800 million people were going hungry, the UN’s latest Food Waste Index Report says.

It said that more than 1 billion tonnes of food – one fifth of all the produce available – was wasted in 2022, most by households.

“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said in a statement.

Such wastage was not just a moral but “environmental failure”, the report said.

Food waste produces five times the planet-heating emissions of the aviation sector, and requires huge tracts of land be converted for growing crops that are never eaten.

The report, co-authored with non-profit organisation WRAP, is just the second on global food waste compiled by the UN and provides the most complete picture to date.

As data collection has improved the true scale of the problem has become much clearer, said Clementine O’Connor from UNEP.

“The more food waste you look for, the more that you find,” she told AFP.

The report said that the “billion meals” figure was a “very conservative estimate” and “the real amount could be much higher”.

“For me, it’s just staggering,” Richard Swannell from WRAP told AFP. (AFP)