Direct Economic Costs of $750 billion Annually
Better Policies Required, and “Success
Stories” Need to be Scaled Up and Replicated
Rome, 11 September 2013 – The waste
of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing
major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural
resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report
released today.
Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural
Resources is the first study to analyze the impacts of global food
wastage from an environmental perspective, looking specifically at its
consequences for the climate, water and land use, and biodiversity.
Among its key findings:
Each year, food that is produced but not eaten
guzzles up a volume of water three times larger than the annual flow of
Russia’s Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes
of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere.
In addition to its environmental impacts,
the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding
fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO’s report
estimates.
“We all – farmers and fishers; food processers
and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers
-- must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food
wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when
we can’t,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.
“In addition the environmental imperative,
there is a moral one: We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food
we produce to go to waste, when 870 million people go hungry every day,
” he added.
As a companion to its new study, FAO has also
published “tool-kit” that contains recommendations on how food loss and
waste can be reduced at every stage of the food chain.
The tool-kit profiles a number of projects
around the world that show how national and local governments, farmers,
businesses, and individual consumers can take steps to tackle the problem.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General
and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, said:"UNEP
and FAO have identified food waste and loss--food wastage--as a major opportunity
for economies everywhere to assist in a transition towards a low carbon,
resource efficient and inclusive Green Economy. Today's excellent report
by the FAO underlines the multiple benefits that can be realized-- in many
cases through simple and thoughtful measures by for example households,
retailers, restaurants, schools and businesses--that can contribute to
environmental sustainability, economic improvements, food security and
the realization of the UN Secretary General's Zero Hunger Challenge. We
would urge everyone to adopt the motto of our joint campaign: Think Eat
Save--Reduce Your Foodprint!".
UNEP and FAO are founding partners of the
Think
Eat Save--Reduce Your Foodprint
campaign that was launched earlier in the year and whose aim is to assist
in coordinating world-wide efforts to manage down wastage.
Where wastage happens
Fifty-four percent of the world’s food wastage
occurs “upstream” during production, post-harvest handling and storage,
according to FAO’s study. Forty-six percent of it happens “downstream,”
at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.
As a general trend, developing countries suffer
more food losses during agricultural production, while food waste at the
retail and consumer level tends to be higher in middle- and high-income
regions -- where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage -- than
in low-income regions (4-16 percent).
The later a food product is lost along the
chain, the greater the environmental consequences, FAO’s report notes,
since the environmental costs incurred during processing, transport, storage
and cooking must be added to the initial production costs.
Hot spots
Several world food wastage “hot-spots” stand out in the study:
Wastage of cereals in Asia is a significant problem, with major impacts on carbon emissions and water and land use. Rice’s profile is particularly noticeable, given its high methane emissions combined with a large level of wastage.
While meat wastage volumes in all world regions is comparatively low, the meat sector generates a substantial impact on the environment in terms of land occupation and carbon footprint, especially in high-income countries and Latin America, which in combination account for 80 percent of all meat wastage. Excluding Latin America, high-income regions are responsible for about 67 percent of all meat wastage
Fruit wastage contributes significantly to water waste in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, mainly as a result of extremely high wastage levels.
Similarly, large volumes of vegetable wastage in industrialized Asia, Europe, and South and South East Asia translates into a large carbon footprint for that sector.
Causes of food wastage – and options for addressing them
A combination of consumer behavior and lack of communication in the supply chain underlies the higher levels of food waste in affluent societies, according to FAO. Consumers fail to plan their shopping, overpurchase, or over-react to “best-before-dates,” while quality and aesthetic standards lead retailers to reject large amounts of perfectly edible food.
In developing countries, significant post-harvest losses in the early part of the supply chain are a key problem, occurring as a result of financial and structural limitations in harvesting techniques and storage and transport infrastructure, combined with climatic conditions favorable to food spoilage.
To tackle the problem, FAO’s toolkit details three general levels where action is needed:
· High priority should be given to reducing food wastage in the first place. Beyond improving losses of crops on farms due to poor practices, doing more to better balance production with demand would mean not using natural resources to produce unneeded food in the first place.
· In
the event of a food surplus, re-use within the human food chain-- finding
secondary markets or donating extra food to feed vulnerable members of
society-- represents the best option. If the food is not fit for human
consumption, the next best option is to divert it for livestock feed, conserving
resources that would otherwise be used to produce commercial feedstuff.
· Where
re-use is not possible, recycling and recovery should be pursued: by-product
recycling, anaerobic digestion, compositing, and incineration with energy
recovery allow energy and nutrients to be recovered from food waste, representing
a significant advantage over dumping it in landfills. (Uneaten food that
ends up rotting in landfills is a large producer of methane, a particularly
harmful GHG.
Funding for the Food Wastage Footprint report and toolkit was provided by the government of Germany.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Food loss is the unintended reduction in food available for human consumption that results from inefficiencies in supply chains: poor infrastructure and logistics, lack of technology, insufficient skills, knowledge and management capacity. It mainly occurs at production- postharvest and processing stages, for example when food goes unharvested or is damaged during processing, storage and transport and disposed of.
Food waste refers to intentional discards of edible items, mainly by retailers and consumers, and is due to the behavior of businesses and individuals.
The term food wastage refers to the two in combination.
Food wastage: Key facts and figures
· The global volume of food wastage s estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of “primary product equivalents.” Total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes.
· Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
· The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent than three times the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
· Similarly, 1.4 billion hectares of land – 28% percent of the world’s agricultural area – is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.
· Agriculture is responsible for a majority of threats to at-risk plant and animal species tracked by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
· Only a low percentage of all food wastage is composted: much of it ends up in landfills, and represents a large part of municipal solid waste. Methane emissions from landfills represents one of the largest sources of GHG emissions from the waste sector.
· Home composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection authorities.
· Developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while in higher in middle- and high-income regions, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher.
· The direct economic consequences of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually.
What governments, farmers, food businesses – and you – can do about food waste
Reduce and prevent
One major front for action in the effort to reduce food wastage is developing better food harvest, storage, processing, transport and retailing processes, according to FAO’s guide, Toolkit: Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint, released alongside its new report on the environmental consequences of food waste.
Harvest losses have several causes, including
bad timing of and poor conditions during the harvest as well is inadequate
techniques and equipment. Similarly, lack of good infrastructure for transportation,
storage, cooling and marketing cause food to spoil, especially in hot climates.
Both the private and public sectors need to
increase investments to address such shortcomings; doing so will also have
additional benefits for food security and mitigating climate change, land
degradation and biodiversity erosion..
In addition to these core investments, new
technologies can help too. Improved rice-storage bags in the Philippines
have helped cut losses of that staple grain by 15 percent. In West Africa,
use of solar dryers to extend the shelf life of fruit and tubers is showing
promise in reducing post-harvest losses.
Often, food losses can be significantly reduced
simply through training farmers in best practices—this too merits investing
in, according to FAO’s toolkit.
Joining farmers together in cooperatives
or professional associations can greatly help reduce food losses by
increasing their understanding of the market, enabling more efficient planning,
enabling economies of scale and improving their ability to market what
they produce.
On the retail and consumer side, raising
awareness of the problem – and how to prevent it—is just as important,
according to FAO.
And businesses and households alike need
to implement better monitoring to improve data on the scale of wastage
and where it occurs.
Business – both those operating within the
food chain as well as others with a large “food footprint” (large cafeterias,
for instance) – can conduct food waste audits to determine how and why
they waste food and identify opportunities to improve their performance.
Households can conduct relatively simple food
waste audits as well.
Better communication among all participants
in food supply chains will be crucial. In particular, there
is vast room for improvement improving communication between suppliers
and retailers to match demand and supply. Discrepancies between demand
and supply are a major cause of food wastage. They can involve farmers
not finding a market for products and leaving them to rot in the field;
mothers cooking for five family members while only three actually make
it to dinner; supermarkets downsizing product orders at the last minute,
leaving producers with unsalable products; or restaurants overestimating
demand and overstocking food supplies that go bad.
Reduced, or better, food packaging
has a role to play as well –excessive or unsustainably sourced packing
forms part of the environmental cost of food.
Especially in developed countries, more
environmentally-minded food retailing is needed, says FAO – for example,
moving away from the practice of displaying very large quantities of food
(perceived as contributing to increased sales) or discarding food when
it starts to approach the end of its shelf life.
Rejection of food products on the basis of
aesthetic or safety concerns is often another a major cause of food losses
and waste. In some cases, farmers discard between 20-40 percent of their
fresh produce because it doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.
Regulations and standards on aesthetic
requirements for fruit and vegetables could stand to be revised. Some
supermarkets have already begun relaxing their standards on fruit appearance,
selling “mis-shaped” items for a reduced price and helping raise consumers’
awareness that odd-shaped does not mean bad.
Better consumption habits are also badly
needed. In developed countries, a significant part of total food wastage
occurs at the consumer level; in some places this is a trend that continues
to rise.
In addition to conducting household food waste
audits, consumers can take many steps to reverse these trends, such
as: making weekly menu plans, buying so-called “ugly fruits and vegetables,”
ensuring that refrigerators are working properly, using wilting produce
in soups, and making better use of leftovers. Smaller servings, rotating
older food items towards the front of shelves and refrigerators, freezing
surplus items, and composting waste can also help.
One factor that often contributes to food
waste by consumers is confusion over sell-by and best-before dates, notes
the FAO toolkit. In some cases “over-zealous” legislation has been
adopted and should be revisited and revised; lawmakers and other authorities
should also issue clearer and more flexible guidelines for businesses and
consumers alike.
Governments must do more to implement legislation aimed at lowering food wastage, says FAO. According to the toolkit, “Legislators will have to adopt a range of measures which may vary from broad policy frameworks to statements of intent, from soft law measures like recommendations and guidelines to more decisive legislation, such as directives, regulations and statutory acts.”
Re-use
Markets for products that wouldn’t normally stay in the food chain must be developed, argues Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint Gleaning, for example, is the practice of gathering groups that would, for one reason or the other, be left in the fields to rot and be plowed under. In some places, entrepreneurs have spotted opportunities in acquiring such produce at reduced rates and marketing it, developing new food value chains.
Similarly, markets can be developed for products rejected by retailers but still good for consumption – farmers’ markets are already playing a role here.
Redistributing safe surplus food to those in need represents “the best option” for dealing with food waste, argues FAO’s study.
At present, the amount of food redistributed to charities that feed people remains a tiny fraction of the edible surplus food available, due to the fact that such food redistribution faces a number of barriers.
“Retailers are largely influenced by the idea that it is cheaper and easier to send wastage to the landfill, although higher landfill taxes are now working as a deterrent,” explains FAO’s toolkit. But, it adds, the factor that has most deterred businesses from donating food surpluses is the risk of being held legally liable in case of intoxication, illness or other injury. Increasingly, governments are looking at ways to smooth the process and afford protections to food donors should products given away in good faith cause illness.
Recycle
In order for cities and local governments to efficiently and effectively recycle food waste, actions taken at the household level to separate it out are essential -- recycling schemes only work when waste is properly sorted at the source. Judiciously used, regulations can spur businesses and households to reduce food waste and better manage it when it comes time for recycling.
Rather than merely disposing of such waste in landfills, the use of anaerobic digestion to break it down into digestate -- which can be used as fertilizer -- and biogas, which can be used as an energy source or injected into the gas grid -- is environmentally preferable to both composting and landfill disposal.
Where digestion is not possible, composting
represents the best fall-back option. At the individual level, home
composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household
per year from local collection authorities.
Finally, incineration of food waste with
the energy released being recovered presents the option of last resort
for preventing food waste from ending up in landfills. Methane emissions
from landfills represent the largest source of GHG emissions from the entire
waste sector, contributing around 700 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent
per year.
To download the Inforgraphics on Food Waste, please Visit
http://www.unep.org/newscentre/videos/shortfilms/MASTER99.mp4
Related Reports, Facts and Figures
UNEP discussion paper on the role of global food consumption patterns in sustainable food systems: http://www.unglobalcompact.org/docs/news_events/upcoming/RioCSF/partner_deliverables/Role_of_Global_Food_Consumption_Patterns.pdf
The work of UNEP's Resource Efficiency Programme on Agri-Food: http://www.unep.org/resourceefficiency/Home/Business/SectoralActivities/AgricultureFood/tabid/78943/Default.aspx
For outreach and to join the campaign, please contact:
Lucita Jasmin, Head of Special Events, UNEP
+254 20 762 3401
lucita.jasmin@unep.org
For Further Information, Contact:
Nick Nuttall, UNEP Director of Communications and Spokesperson
Tel: +254 733 632755 or +41 795965737 (Roaming), Email: nick.nuttall@unep.org
UNEP Newsdesk : Tel. +254 723 857 270,
Email : unepnewsdesk@unep.org
FAO
Erwin Northoff. Tel: (+39) 348 25 23 616 , Email: erwin.northoff@fao.org
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