The Environmental Impact Of Food Waste
Do you know what is food waste? Well, I do.
United Nations estimates that one in nine people in the world do not have access to sufficient food to lead a healthy life. More people are reported to die from hunger every day than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. But at the same time, nearly one-third of the food that is produced in the world is lost or wasted due to one reason or the other. Food wastage, which includes both food loss and food waste, is not only morally irresponsible, but also causes huge economical losses as well as severe damage to the world around us.
While food loss happens mainly at the production stage due to insufficient skills, natural calamities, lack of proper infrastructure and poor practices, food waste occurs when edible food is intentionally discarded by consumers after they fail to plan their meals properly and store food till it spoils or goes past the expiry date. At times, food waste can also happen due to oversupply in markets. Retailers also tend to reject a lot of food because it doesn’t conform to their quality and aesthetic standards. A 2013 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report, which was the first study to analyze the impacts of global food wastage on the environment, says that nearly one-third of all food produced in the world for human consumption does not find its way to our tables.
More than 50 percent of the waste occurs during “upstream” or the production, yield handling and storage phase and the remaining happens during processing, distribution and consumption stages or the “downstream” phase.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations was also able to discern a clear pattern in food waste at the global level. While middle and higher income regions showed greater food loss and waste during the downstream phase or at the consumption level, developing countries were more likely to lose or waste food at the upstream phase due to lack of proper harvest techniques and infrastructure.
It goes without saying that the later food is wasted along the chain, the greater is its environmental impact, because then we also have to take into consideration the energy and natural resources expended in processing, transporting, storing and cooking it. If included in a list of countries ranked according to their greenhouse emissions, food waste would come in the third spot, right after USA and China.
With agriculture accounting for 70 percent of the water used throughout the world, food waste also represents a great waste of freshwater and ground water resources. It is said that a volume of water roughly three times the volume of Lake Geneva is used just to produce food that is not eaten. By throwing out one kilogram of beef, you are essentially wasting 50,000 liters of water that were used to produce that meat. In the same way, nearly 1000 liters of water are wasted when you pour one glass of milk down the drain.
For more of this information, visit this website: https://www.moveforhunger.org/the-environmental-impact-of-food-waste/
