Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
What a waste in a hungry world
MELBOURNE in Australia generates around 900 000 tonnes of edible food waste a year, a rate of 207kg a person.
This wasted food requires 3.6 million hectares of land and 180 gigalitres of water to produce each year – and the production of this food would generate 2.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emission.
This was the sombre statement made by Dr Seona Candy of the University of Melbourne, during a session on Food Losses and Waste at the 3rd International Conference on Global Food Security at the Cape Town International Conference Centre this month.
In an address titled “Waste Not – Want Not: Volume and Environmental Impact of Food Waste in Melbourne”, Dr Candy said 30 to 50% of the edible food produced in the world is wasted.
“If food waste were a country, it would have the third highest emissions, after the US and China.
“Just a quarter of food wasted globally would be enough to feed all the hungry people worldwide,” she told delegates, adding that these losses are wasting increasingly scarce resources like land and water – and they also contribute to climate change.
Dr Candy said more than 50% of the world’s population currently lives in cities. “By 2050 it will be 66%. This will result in increasing demands on food supply chains to feed all those people.”
Dr Candy said about 40% of food waste occurs in households but 60% occurs earlier in the food chain.
There needs to be an emphasis on addressing the losses and wastes which take place earlier on, she said.
Programmes like “reduce and reuse” and other awareness programmes, as well as technology for meal planning and and educational programmes to improve food literacy are good moves, but they are not enough.
“These address the symptom, not the cause. We need to go back to the beginning to work out where the food is being wasted.”
Speaking during the same session, Professor Urs Steiner Brandt, associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, spoke of a study where he attempted to identify so-called “choke points” or individual reasons for reducing food waste. Consumers interviewed cited a number of reasons for wasting food – such as wanting to be perceived as good providers, excessive buying to avoid unnecessary trips to the shops, and a simple lack of food management skills.
“Given that the total elimination of food waste is not feasible, the focus must be on areas that will have the most impact on food waste,” he said.