One third of world’s food lost or wasted, UN report shows

AROUND one third of the food produced in the world every year — about 1.3 billion tons — gets lost or wasted, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said yesterday.

“Given the limited availability of natural resources it is more effective to reduce food losses than increase food production in order to feed a growing world population,” the FAO said.

The FAO said the amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world’s annual cereals crop.

Some 925 million people around the world suffer from hunger.

The report said the problem in the developing world was mainly food losses through, for example, crop failures and poor infrastructure.

In industrialised countries, the issue is more about “retailers and consumers throwing perfectly edible foodstuffs into the trash”.

The report found that in Europe and North America consumers wasted between 95kg and 115kg of food every year.

The report found that in the retail industry there was an “over-emphasis on appearance”. “Surveys show that consumers are willing to buy produce not meeting appearance standards as long as it is safe and tastes good,” it said.

“Consumers in rich countries are generally encouraged to buy more food than they need,” it said, giving as an example oversized ready-to-eat meals produced by the food industry and fixed-price buffets in restaurants.