SA wastes 10m tons of food a year

A new study shows how 45% of available food supply is wasted

It was a conversation with a farmer about his “imperfect” patty pans that struck Professor Suzan Oelofse about how food is wasted in South Africa. Oelofse, a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), was doing research for a study that she led, which shows how in South Africa an estimated 10.3-million tonnes a year of edible food does not reach people’s stomachs.

“This farmer sells patty pans, which grow quickly once the fruit starts forming,” she says. “They harvest [from] Monday until lunchtime on Saturday and every day the patty pans are the same size. But by [the following] Monday morning, they’re sometimes nearly double the size because now a day and a half’s growth has happened.”

These patty pans are too large for retailers, Oelofse says.

“They want 10 or 12 per punnet that they can package because this is what they perceive the consumer wants. The over-sized ones are either donated or sent to the informal market where they sit outside in the sun, so the shelf-life is shortened and they often go to waste.”

Oelofse says consumers have been “trained” by retailers to demand perfection and uniformity in shape, size and colour.

“I always say that people tend to forget that fresh fruit and vegetables don’t come out of a factory with a mould for only round tomatoes or straight cucumbers.”

Although she has sympathy with retailers, because a “bunch of crooked cucumbers don’t fit easily into a crate and this makes it difficult to transport”, Oelofse believes South Africa can do a lot more to improve its supply chain.

According to the study, which was funded by the department of science and innovation, South Africa’s food waste is equivalent to 34% of local food production, but because the country is a net exporter of food, the losses and waste are equivalent to 45% of the available food supply.

This also has economic, environmental and climate implications.

Sixty-eight percent of this wastage unfolds in the early stages of production, with 19% occurring during post-harvest handling and storage and 49% during processing and packaging. Cereals contribute half of the overall losses and waste, followed by fruit and vegetables (19%), milk (14%) and meat (9%).

“A lot of the fresh produce … is diverted to animal feed, which is a win-win in a way, but if you consider the amount of people that still go hungry, then you cannot justify diverting food waste to [animal] feed rather than to consumers,” Oelofse says.

Globally, food production must increase by 70% by 2050 to meet the demand. Yet nearly one third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year.

The environmental effects of food waste in the country are “staggering”, she says. “If you take into account all the food produced for consumption that is not consumed, it means that all the input material to produce that food is also wasted. That includes the water, the energy, and the diesel that is used on farms, and all the emissions associated with the entire supply chain.”

The decomposition of wasted food disposed of at landfills generates methane, a greenhouse gas more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change.

“You also have the potential for water and air pollution and we are running out of landfill space, especially in the big metro areas.”

The study shows how food waste in the consumption stage has soared from 5% in 2013 to 18% in 2021. According to the CSIR and the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment’s food waste prevention and management guideline for South Africa, on average each person in Johannesburg disposes of 12kg of food a year into the municipal bin, and in Ekurhuleni it is 8kg a person a year.

“The bulk of our consumers sit in urban areas. We don’t produce our own food and buy it in the

shop,” Oelofse says. “We are further removed from the farm. Then you also sit with the consumer buying food without using a shopping list or sticking to it and falling for the specials, like the buy four for R100.”

This sounds cheap “but people don’t realise that these special offers are a way for the retailers to avoid food waste at the retail level and they are therefore pushing it to the consumer who often ends up wasting it.”

Food is wasted because people are not aware of its implications, Oelofse says. “The moment you start thinking about food waste in your own household, you think differently about how you handle food and how much you buy, to try to avoid unnecessary wastage. Best of all, in the end you save yourself money.”