Households around the world binned one billion meals a day in 2022, the United Nations has said. The global organisation has called it a “global tragedy” of food waste. In its latest Food Waste Index Report, the UN stated that over $1 trillion worth of food was thrown away by businesses and households when about 800 million people were going hungry.
In 2022, over 1 billion tonnes of food -- which is nearly one-fifth of the produce available on the global market -- was wasted by people, most of it by households, news agency AFP reported.
Such a huge quantity of food wastage was not just a moral but ‘environmental failure,’ the UN report, co-authored with non-profit organisation WRAP, stated.
“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said.
Food waste necessitates the conversion of vast areas of land for the production of crops that are never eaten and it emits five times as many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the aviation industry.
It is just the second report compiled by the UN on global food waste and gives a more complete picture to date.
Clementine O’Connor from UNEP noted that as data collection has improved, the true scale of the food wastage problem has become much clearer.
The UN report further mentions that the ‘billion meals’ figure is just a “very conservative estimate”, while “the real amount could be much higher”.
Richard Swannell from WRAP said people can feed those who are hungry in the world "just from the food that is wasted every single year".
The report further noted that restaurants, canteens, hotels and other food chains were responsible for 28% of all wasted food in 2022, while retailers like greengrocers and butchers dumped 12%.
However, the biggest culprits were the households, as they accounted for 60% and dumped some 631 million tonnes of food.
One of the major reasons behind this was that people were buying more food than they needed, and they even misjudged portion sizes and did not prefer eating the leftovers.
Expiration dates were another reason behind the food wastage.
Mainly in developing countries, a lot of food was not so frivolously wasted, but instead, it was lost in transportation or spoiling because of lack of refrigeration, the report stated.
It stated that contrary to popular belief, food wastage was not just a rich country problem and was observed worldwide, adding that this has had ‘devastating effects’ on the planet and the people.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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